Many small-to-medium businesses we speak to initially think they don’t ‘need’ dashboarding an tend to feel that it would be a ‘nice-to-have.  These companies typically don’t think of dashboarding as something worth investing time and money in.  Some of these companies tend to focus more on reporting and do use tools like Excel to extract and report on their data.  However, these businesses seem to place little importance on...

IBM has been helping organizations put Artificial Intelligence (AI) to work to drive meaningful outcomes for business for many years now. But implementing AI isn’t always a turnkey solution. Often data are spread across an organization sitting in various silos making it difficult to deploy AI at scale. As a result, some companies are limiting their experimentation with AI, which can in turn limit their competitiveness in the...

With the huge phenomenon online shopping has become, many small businesses find themselves competing more and more with large corporations and online retailers that can offer reduced prices. To make better decisions, you need a clear picture of your company’s operational and financial situation. Having ‘one version of the truth’ not only empowers you to make strategic decisions on how to avoid wasteful spending but in turn increases...

Over the past many years, most organisations looking for enterprise planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting applications have been steered away from spreadsheets by performance management vendors.  However, since most companies opt for Microsoft Excel, it is still the preferred tool for many business users, particularly analysts.  Because it’s free, a lot of companies are reluctant to replace Excel with another tool that will...