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Workspace Analytics — Taking a Step Forward

Thousands of employees. Multiple countries. Thousands of clients. Hundreds of offices. But is this metric even relevant anymore? The reality is that every one of our knowledge workers is “an office”; a virtual, movable, fluid, office. I am sure that anyone joining the workplace from here on out will have never lived in a world of non-connectivity. With such a huge amount of office data I wonder if it is easy to convert these data points to our benefit by enabling ourselves to extract meaningful insights out of it.

Well, as a matter of fact, I came across one such extraordinary solution that offers KPIs, dashboards and operational metrics — that not just enhances security and productivity but also minimizes administrative labor in the planning process.

I read this white paper [Succeed with Workspace Analytics] about “workspace analytics” that offers a tool that integrates smooth implementation and exceptional analytical capabilities to facilitate the deeper discovery of insights into improving the end-user experience.

While this may not seem like such a big deal, let me tell you why it is a huge deal. I believe that these additions represent the tipping point in which the end-users give in and decide that workspace analytics is their primary interface for data gathering, assessment tools and complementary analytics to better understand their users’ needs and working habits.

Although I have seen some folks dive head first into a new technology solution, I have also seen many of them “dip their toe in the water” with a new technology, but fall back to their comfort zone of traditional analytics. It is my opinion that though this orthodox way of analyzing has been the long time regime, it will no longer be possible with so many data points and that workspace analytics will become a necessity going forward. Of course, it will take some time to learn the new interface, but the advantages are so compelling at this point, that those not making the shift will risk being left behind in this competitive age.

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Succeed with Workspace Analytics for IT

There are 3 pillars of workspace analytics :

Digital experience monitoring (DEM)

Asset Optimisation

Event Correlation and Analysis

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a newly defined area within the world of Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

Gartner defines DEM as “an availability and performance monitoring discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, as it interacts with enterprise applications and services. For the purposes of this evaluation, it includes real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) for both web- and mobile-based end users.”

Leading Tools for Digital Experience Monitoring: RUM and STM

Real user monitoring (RUM) gives you the answers by recording all interactions with your applications from the user’s point of view. Your development and operations teams will be able to swiftly trace errors and diagnose the specific application point of failure. RUM keeps track of actual service-level quality delivered to end user’s device.

Before you release any app into production, though, you should conduct a reasonable amount of testing to eliminate potential errors and performance bottlenecks. How can you test your apps thoroughly when they are is still in a development or pre-production stage? Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) simulates user actions with behavioral scripts. This insight is mission-critical if you are running an online store or any site where you can reasonably expect traffic spikes. These anomalies are how your performance engineers will be able to identify and eliminate application issues before the customer reports them.

Mobile monitoring has to include not only your server performance but how your tools specifically execute on native mobile platforms. Outside of mobile, DEM concerns itself with web apps delivered to a traditional browser. Meanwhile, on the back end, there are APIs and code execution that may cause slowdown and impact the overall user experience.

The customers of today and tomorrow expect all of your online tools and communications channels to work flawlessly. Whether you’re undergoing your own digital transformation or consolidating an existing strategy, the customer expectations are the only measure that matter and performance is your only key to success. Luckily, your customers are rarely disappointed, due to advances in APM suite technologies. To keep that unstated promise as more devices come online and put increasing strain on the capacity of the user-experience, you will need full visibility into all available channels and a central command to watch over them. That is why the acronym DEM is about to get a lot more play in offices all over the planet and why a solid DEM strategy is critical to your business success.

With more organizations focused on digital transformation a DEM strategy is critical Below are nine reasons why organizations need to move from APM to DEM.

1. The Internet of Things

These machine to machine transactions are just as important to monitor as the human to machine interactions to avoid damage to brand and customer satisfaction.

2. Mobile is everywhere

For mobile the necessary information means not only monitoring performance of the application from mobile devices and providers but also monitoring the APIs delivering content to the mobile application. Mobile applications rely on APIs to communicate with back end infrastructure. Ensuring these APIs are returning valid information with no errors or delays is a critical component of a DEM strategy.

3. Pick a protocol

No application uses a single protocol. What protocols matter to your organization and are they all being monitored? Solutions that only monitor HTTP can leave gaps in your monitoring strategy. Are key business applications using FTP, WebSockets? if so these protocols need to be included in a DEM strategy.

4. User experience is no longer about page load time

There has been a shift in the web performance space away from page load time as the metric to measure in terms of how well an application performs. What matters more is how the user perceived the loading of the page. It doesn’t matter to the user if elements they can’t see aren’t loading, they only care about when they can interact with the page. Measurements such as Speed Index, Critical Resources Index and Perceptual Speed Index have emerged to attempt to measure the perceived page load time.

5. Be more agile

With Agile development, releases are happening at a much higher cadence, requiring companies to continuously test and optimize their applications to stay in business. Even with testing, code releases can cause unexpected performance degradation. Being notified about these as soon as possible leads to a faster resolution or roll back if needed. It isn’t possible to test every permutation of browser, device, and network provider which is why companies are including RUM as a part of their DEM strategy.

6. Non-stop information

Information is being served and shared on an almost constant basis. Phones and computers are constantly informing us of the arrival of a new message, tweet, sports update, etc. It sometimes feels like we are overwhelmed with information, but we have also come to expect this. The outrage that occurs when information isn’t immediately available quickly spreads and can cause organizations to lose customers.

7. Influence of social media

Today when news breaks, or an application is unavailable information spreads quickly across social media. These days stories of site outages aren’t as newsworthy as they once were. What matters more is not the details about the issue but rather how the organization handled the communication. If your site is having issues, users will flood online to share their negative feelings. The need to track and monitor social sentiment is becoming more critical. Transparency during issues is needed. Responding to social messages quickly and sharing details on progress is expected.

8. Need to reduce spend on running IT

Would you rather spend money on fun things like vacations, a nice bottle of wine, or a new car; or do you want all of your money to go towards your mortgage/rent, groceries, and utilities? If you’re like me you want money to spend on the fun things. Businesses are the same way, the less money spent on the running of IT frees up more money to be spent on fun things like innovation.

9. Maintain a competitive advantage

Failing to keep up with demands of digital consumers will drive companies behind, and today the majority of consumers are digital. With a DEM strategy you can find valuable performance insights in application performance data and user behavior. Survey results from Digital Enterprise Journal’s recent Digital Transformation Benchmark found that competition is increasingly important to organizations. Half of the statements have to do with competition.

Asset Optimisation

Asset Optimisation (AO) is a structured approach to optimise business operations by identifying, defining, planning and implementing initiatives that will unleash significant value improvement potential from current assets.

This value improvement could come from, for example, increased productivity, enhanced efficiency and capital spend optimisation.

Asset Optimization enables asset intensive organizations to respond faster and make better decisions that directly impact the bottom line by:

-> Improving resource utilization and optimizing complex maintenance tasks

-> Improving equipment reliability and reducing overall asset lifecycle costs

-> Increasing safety and reducing regulatory risk using industry standard configuration management processes

-> Improving the management of materials, inventory and equipment to raise the visibility and lower the cost of your supply chain

-> Improve the management of people, their skills and their tasks to optimize productivity of your workforce

-> Providing solutions driven by industry best practices to drive standardization across your fleet

Event Correlation and Analysis

Event correlation is a technique for making sense of a large number of events and pinpointing the few events that are really important in that mass of information. This is accomplished by looking for and analyzing relationships between events.

Event correlation usually takes place inside one or several management platforms. It is implemented by a piece of software known as the event correlator. This component is automatically fed with events originating from managed elements (applications, devices), monitoring tools, the Trouble Ticket System, etc. Each event captures something special (from the event source standpoint) that happened in the domain of interest to the event correlator, which will vary depending upon the type of analysis the correlator is attempting to perform.

The event correlator plays a key role in integrated management, for only within it do events from many disparate sources come together and allow for comparison across sources. For instance, this is where the failure of a service can be ascribed to a specific failure in the underlying IT infrastructure, or where the root cause of a potential security attack can be identified.

Most event correlators can receive events from trouble ticket systems. However, only some of them are able to notify trouble ticket systems when a problem is solved, which partly explains the difficulty for Service Desks to keep updated with the latest news. In theory, the integration of management in organizations requires the communication between the event correlator and the trouble ticket system to work both ways.

Event correlation and analysis (ECA) is IT’s time machine. By saving data collected about a system, workspace analytics solutions provide a record of what was happening on a system at any given point in time. If your house caught on fire, chances are you’d like to know why. ECA is about discovering where the smoke detectors are going off and examining the surrounding infrastructure to be able to quell the flame and, eventually, put measures in place to prevent similar incidents in the future. ECA capabilities within workspace analytics solutions have the end goal of solving IT problems quickly, and (ideally) automatically.

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Contract Management Software

It is a program or series of related programs for storing and managing legal agreements such as contracts with vendors, leases and licensing agreements. An important purpose of this software is to streamline administrative tasks and reduce overhead by providing a single, unified view of each contract’s processes.

It can be visualized as an electronic version of a filling cabinet. It supports the entire customer and contract lifecycle which covers any process that contributes, creates or utilizes contract data. Effective Contract Management requires an understanding of every step in the contract process, including any step that contributes, creates, or utilizes contract data.

Challenges of Contract Management

1. Manual contract management introduces bottlenecks into the sales cycle.

Legal is often the department responsible for creating, managing and maintaining contracts within the enterprise. Unfortunately, when Legal has to manage contracts manually, the contract management process gets bottlenecked. This leads other departments, particularly Sales, to see Legal as “the department of no.”

2. Manual contract management introduces (manual) errors.

Mistakes, such as:

Non-compliance

Revenue leakage

Extended sales cycle times

Jeopardized customer relationships

Stages of Contract Management

1) Request

With an automated contract request process with a guided self-service tool, individual business groups can request contract types as needed. A single online repository collects all contracts, which can be accessed by anyone with the right permissions to review them. Contracts can be searched and analyzed against each other.

2) Generate

Legal can create easy-to-find, easy-to-use templates for every day contracts and common clauses as well as an explicit set of rules which can be used by business users to create contracts.

Sales can create the right contract using a wizard or guide that pulls appropriate terms and conditions, with controls on which langauge or terms can or cannot be changed, and identifying who in legal or business would have to approve alterations.

High-value resources (lawyers) can focus on the exceptions (complex or one-off strategic agreements that require significant negotiations, time, etc.). The legal department can establish exception management, which will notify them anytime a sales rep tries to submit a contract to a customer with outdated legal language or non-standard terms.

3) Negotiate

Shrink the amount of time lawyers spend preparing and reviewing negotiations with the ‘Track Changes’ feature, identifying who made which modification at what date and time, so you can view, modify and change drafts without fear.

4) Approval

Users can tailor approval workflows (both parallel and serial approvals) to decrease the time of the contract lifecycle.

5) Execute

Terms become a set of instructions for the different parties who need to deliver against them. Revenue recognition begins. Contracts are stored on a centralized online server for easy access and searchability in case of disputes or amendments.

6) Search/Report

All different departments (sales, legal, finance, fulfillment and operations) need contract information at different times for different reasons, so contracts can be, accessed electronically. Terms and metadata are searched and reported on with ease.

7) Comply

An automated system bridges the gap between the CRM and ERP systems, and makes sure the right requirements are applied for specific situations.

Organize contracts by groups, identify common components and store contracts in a searchable electronic repository so commitments are monitored in real-time.

With organized contracts, building a Contract Template Library and Standard Legal Playbooks are easy next steps.

Each change to a contract is delivered to sales, customer success, fulfillment and operations team to fully integrate the front- and back-end systems.

8) Amend/Review

Alerts help companies renew contracts they want to keep, end contracts that are no longer useful, and start the process of renegotiation early enough before the end date to allow time to reach agreement on new terms for these contracts.

Here is a Contract Management Software for your enterprise

Benefits of Contract Management Software

Decreased contract cycle time

Stop revenue leakage

Increased visibility

Increased compliance

Increased security

Increase control

Diminish risk

Increased user adoption rates

More face-time with customers

Reduced admin costs

Greater contract flexibility

Improve contract renewal rates by 25%

Increase revenue by 1–2%

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What is microphone beamforming? How does it help in achieving a more effective conference setup?

The basic point in beamforming is, when you set multiple transducers next to each other sending out signals [or listening for sound waves], you’re going to get a kind of interference pattern, just like you see in a pond when you throw several stones in at once and create interfering ripples.

If you select the spacing between your transducers and the delay in the transducers’ signals just right, you can create an interference pattern that’s to your benefit, in particular one in which the majority of the signal energy all goes out in one angular direction.

By combining elements [i.e., antennas or microphones] in a phased array, so that signals at particular angles experience constructive interference while others experience destructive interference, beamforming can be used to achieve spatial selectivity and elimination of unwanted signals.

Beamforming microphones are part of a larger family of mics considered to be high-directionality, or perhaps ultra-directional microphones, due to their stunning sound quality, advanced performance, and similarities to phased-array radar.

How does it help in achieving a more effective conference setup?

In the world of professional audio and video teleconferencing – beamforming microphone arrays and their associated mixers, digital signal processors, and echo-canceling functions represent the newest, most advanced technological innovations, breaking new ground for teleconference sound fidelity, clarity, and intelligibility.

Modern beamforming technology has the proven ability to surpass traditional techniques for clearly capturing and reproducing human voices in conferencing applications, and rejecting unwanted sounds, to optimize collaboration and understanding among conference participants.

When conveniently installed in conference center ceilings, walls, or tabletops, beamforming microphone systems deliver the best, most unobtrusive options for the physical placement of microphones, making them the superior choice for flawless conferencing audio in any setting.

"Using microphone arrays and advanced beamforming technology"

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The availability of so much functionality and economy in High-Performance computing begs the question—why aren’t more organizations moving their HPC clusters to the cloud?

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UNDERSTANDING THE RISKS WHILE CHOOSING A CONTRACT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

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This is how IoT can be helpful for IT Manager in managing meeting rooms

For more details: http://bit.ly/2fLcryy

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5 Signs It's Time You Move Toward a Business Intelligence Solution

Business intelligence (BI) application is increasingly cited as the way to get actionable insights out of the data growing every day, to improve business performance and results.

If your enterprise is like most others, and struggling to get valuable insights from data you want to make smart business strategies and take good business decisions. Click here: <a href=“http://bit.ly/2vAouI7″>To Know More</a>

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Why CFOs Should Change their Budgeting & Forecasting Process?

This descriptive whitepaper outlines seven good reasons you should consider changing your current practices when it comes to budgeting and forecasting which includes:

Data Collection and Analysis Wastes Days, Weeks; To speed the budgeting and forecasting process.

A Data Warehouse Doesn’t Lead to Better Budgeting and Forecasting.

Cloud-based Analytics Tools Deliver High Value to budgeting and forecasting process.

Leverage data for better budgets, forecasting, & decision making. 

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The Top 5 Ways Publishers Can Be Successful in the Digital World

The rise of technology has extended beyond publishers simply digitizing content for those readers who prefer ebooks or digital learning systems to print, forcing businesses to adapt their processes and products to accommodate new customer demand.

This whitepaper explains:

What is the use of Digital Supply Chain? 

What is the impact of Digital Supply Chain and ERP on content publishing? 

What is the future of Digital World with streamlining and acceleration?

Click here for more info: http://bit.ly/2vVXXVn