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Tag: Decision Support

Transform & Innovate Legacy Technology

Resources ($) spent treading water

Transforming legacy technology remains a difficult proposition. A lack of historical expertise by current stakeholders is one impediment, as is transparency of soft costs within the technology budget. The full expenses of legacy infrastructure can remain hidden until confronted with a significant technology outage, or the sudden increase in the cost of maintenance. The average costs and resources of maintaining legacy systems and application averages approximately 30% of an organization’s IT budget, which include:

  • Maintenance
  • Talent (Human capital)
  • Internal and external compliance (i.e. GDRP, etc.)
  • Risk; Security threats and trends
  • Agility, scalability and stability

One of the most important factors in dealing with transforming legacy technology is facing the reality of your organization’s culture and alignment.

Where to start…

Begin by drawing a line around your monolithic systems, code and infrastructure. Often companies believe they must reengineer all their legacy systems from the ground up. This is a common error, however, it is critical to delineate which portions of the system can be inoculated or identified as ‘core’ and then build API or structures around that “core”.

Develop an integration strategy and then construct an integration layer. This means some code will be written from the foundational or infrastructure level, then to the database layer and finally to the user experience environment. It is critical to identify those systems which can be detethered and then “frozen”. This facilitates a phased integration approach, upon which additional functionality can be layered. Depending on the complexity of legacy architecture, these changes may be cost prohibitive, and so the ability to isolate, freeze and use a layered-build approach is an appropriate solution. This will permit an organization to stabilize their applications code and then build APIs or other integration layers around ‘frozen’ areas of the technology stack. In some circumstances, Block-chain can be very useful in providing a fast and simple way to place in an integration layer within the  legacy or ‘frozen’ environments.

Missing Link

The most important component of transformation and innovation is the people within the organization, not the technology or skillsets around the technology.  Industry studies indicate a potential for 20-30% increase in productivity and creative thought if the individuals are engaged and aligned with the organization’s goals, and the change processes align with individual goals and performance.  All departments and stakeholders must be in alignment from product, QA, development, and infrastructure to the end users. This is the most important aspect of any technology transformation initiative;  creating a safe and collaborative environment to facilitate “creative dissent’.

Real Estate: Climate-proof your Portfolio

The real estate industry is built on the power to predict property values. With sea levels on the rise, smart investors are thinking about how to integrate climate science into real estate projections. Complex algorithms and regression models are nothing new to developers and brokerage firms but the rapidly evolving data ecosystem offers breakthrough opportunities in resiliency marketing, valuation and forecasting.

In Miami, investors are starting to look inland for property deals on higher ground. According to a New York Times article by Ian Urbina, “home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25% less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood.” To get in front of the wave, real estate investors and appraisers need to regularly update their forecasting models and integrate new environmental and quality of life data sets. Third party data can be expensive but as municipal governments embrace open data policies, costs may go down.

Today, no fewer than 85 cities across the U.S. have developed open data portals that include data on everything from traffic speed to air quality to SAT results. Real estate professionals are using data to do more than just climate-proof their portfolios. With high-powered business intelligence tools, businesses can turn this rich raw data into better insights on:

Home Valuation

Zillow, an online real estate marketplace is leading the charge on better home valuation data models. The company’s ‘zestimate’ tool is a one-click home value estimator based on 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that analyze hundreds of data points on each property. Now, they’ve launched a $1 million dollar prize competition calling on data scientists to create models that outperform the current Zestimate algorithm.

Design

According to the Census Bureau, in 1960, single-person households made up about 13% of all American households. Now, that number has jumped to 28% of all American households. Additionally, a survey by ATUS cited in a Fast Company article by Lydia Dishman revealed that the number of people working from home increased from 19% in 2003 to 24% in 2015. The rapid rate of technological change means a constant shift in social and cultural norms. The micro-apartment trend and the new WeLive residential project from WeWork are signs of changing times. For developers, the deluge of data being created by millennials provides incredible insight into the needs and desires of tomorrow’s homebuyers.

Marketing

Brokerage firms spend exorbitant amounts of money on marketing but with big data in their pocket, real estate agents can narrow in on clients ready to move and cut their marketing spend in half. According to this Wall Street journal article by Stefanos Chen, saavy real estate agents use data sources like grocery purchases, obituaries and the age of children in the household to predict when a person might be ready to upsize or downsize. This laser-sharp focus allows them to spend their marketing budget wisely and improve conversion rates across the board.

In today’s competitive marketplace, real estate professionals need a self-service data management and analytics platform that can be applied to any use case and doesn’t require advanced IT skills. Synaptik is designed to adapt to your needs and can easily integrate quantitative and qualitative data from websites, social media channels, government databases, video content sites, APIs and SQL databases. Real estate is big business and better intelligence mean better returns. Sign up for a demo and find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

By Nina Robbins

Why Third Party Data Will Transform the Insurance Industry

Insurance Outlook

Insurance companies have always been able to navigate their way through an evolving marketplace. However, according to the Deloitte Insurance Outlook 2018, macroeconomic, social, and regulatory changes are likely to impact insurance companies. In the digital age, insurance companies are dealing with disruptive forces like climate change, the development of autonomous vehicles and the rising threat of cyber attacks. While these trends may seem troublesome, high-tech business intelligence tools can provide more clarity in an increasingly unpredictable world.

With stagnant growth across the industry, insurance companies are investing in new products and business models to gain an advantage in a highly competitive market. The financial goals of every insurance company remains the same – cut costs while improving productivity. These financial goals have become difficult to reach as 1-click digital service has increased consumer expectations. With this in mind, insurance companies are intent on adopting business intelligence and analytical tools that are designed to promote growth and efficiency.

How Can Business Intelligence and Analytics help the Insurance Industry?

Insurance companies have traditionally used CRM software to connect and maintain contact with their potential customers. Now, complicated service industries like healthcare and insurance are starting to see the benefits of using more powerful business intelligence and analytics platforms.

In an unpredictable world, the use of analytics and business intelligence tools can reduce risk and improve decision-making. In 2015, Bain and Company surveyed 70 insurers and found that annual spending on growth on Big Data analytics will reach 24% in life insurance and 27% in P&C (Property and Casualty) insurance. While this information demonstrates the rapid adoption of business intelligence tools, this survey also revealed that 1 in 3 life insurers and 1 in 5 P&C insurers do not use advanced analytics for any function of their business. This leaves an opportunity in the marketplace for insurance companies to utilize business intelligence tools to gain a competitive advantage.

BI allows insurers to gain better insights on their customers in order to create a better experience. These tools not only help companies paint a whole picture of their customers, but they also help strengthen client relationships, market share, and revenue. According to Mckinsey and Company, companies that use data analytics extensively are more than twice as likely to generate above average profits.

The Takeaway

Working in the insurance industry can be exciting and challenging. The individual sales process can be rewarding as the success of a sale is the responsibility of a single agent. Insurance agents are often fully occupied with meetings and phone calls. While insurance agents normally have access to basic demographic data, third party data vendors have become increasingly popular because of their capability to combine data sets and provide new insights that were previously unknown. Additionally, third party data has been a useful resource for insurance companies to understand the motivations of their prospects. By analyzing the social trends and life events of their prospects, insurance agents have the tools to make a stronger sales pitch.

At Synaptik, we pride ourselves on customer service. Our in-house data scientists are to happy to help you identify third party data sets that can be integrated into your current performance management system and put you ahead of the competition. According to the Everest Research Group, adoption of third party data analytics is expected to quadruple in size by 2020. In an increasingly volatile market, third party data will be critical to better planning, decision-making and customer satisfaction.

By Kiran Prakash

Digital Transformation Fatigue – Getting the Most Out of Your Data

In 2011 Ken Perlman from Kotter International, conducted a workshop on change and innovation and saw how continual change was taking a toll on employees as they were exhausted and fatigued. This research from Perlman concluded that 70 percent of transformation efforts failed. Not much has changed since this study.

The rapid rate of technological advancement has resulted in a constant game of catch up. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on new change program that are designed to drive efficiency . With good intentions at the core, this change can lead to “Transformation Fatigue – the sinking feeling that the new change program presented by management will result in as little change as the one that failed in the previous year.”

As the importance of big data continues to increase for businesses in terms of marketing and sales, there are constant efforts to access a more productive data management platform. While companies hope to get the most out of their data management platforms, they can sometimes run into problems. With continuous changes, employees often experience burnout which can create a sense of frustration within a company.

Why are Data Management Platforms Important?

In the digital age, data management platforms (DMPs) are the backbone that help businesses connect and build their audience segments. These platforms are effective in storing and managing data on audiences, sentiment, and engagement. The analyses from data management platforms are designed to create campaigns that can be continually developed to reach certain audience segments.

Many businesses have adopted data management platforms as they have seen quantifiable results. However, the implementation of these platforms has been problematic. A report from the Oracle Marketing Cloud reveals how many companies are experiencing Transformation Fatigue as their employees are not equipped to handle the transition and adoption of new data management platforms.

-Oracle Marketing Cloud and E consultancy

As data management platforms become essential for an effective business, companies will have to understand and organize the incoming data that is presented. According the chart above, 32% of companies are not using a DMP due to a lack of internal expertise. Organizations should strive to maximize their market share relative to their competitors, and the ability to use business intelligence to boost productivity and influence ROI becomes notably important.

The Synaptik platform has been at the forefront of providing strong business intelligence that combines structured and unstructured data. Synaptik connects businesses with services for a variety of purposes such as brand sentiment, campaign effectiveness, and customer experience. The user-friendly platform allows you to create new combinations of pivot tables without the back and forth communication of the IT Department.

The process of acquiring internal and external/3rd party quantitative and qualitative data can be time-consuming and challenging. Different sources like websites, social media channels, video content sites, government databases, APIs & SQL databases require different techniques and have their limitations. This can make sorting and analyzing data very difficult especially without the right technical expertise. Fortunately, Synaptik as a platform comes with data professionals who can assist in building and configuring data agents for 1-click ease of use.

As you can leverage new data analytic processes new “business and data revenue” opportunities can present themselves.

By Joe Sticca

New York Civic Tech Innovation Challenge – Finalist

The Neighborhood Health Project is a 360° urban tech solution that takes the pulse of struggling commercial corridors and helps local businesses keep pace with competition.

New York City’s prized brick-and-mortar businesses are struggling. With the rise of e-commerce, sky high rents and growing operational costs, the small businesses that give New York City Streets their distinctive character face mass extinction.

This year’s NYC Department of Small Business Services Neighborhood Challenge 5.0 paired nonprofit community organizations and tech companies to create and implement tools that address specific commercial district issues. On June 15th, community-based organizations from across the city from the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership to the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, presented tech solutions to promote local business and get a deeper understanding of the economic landscape.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “the Neighborhood Challenge Grant Competition is a bit like the Google Lunar XPrize. Except rather than top engineers competing to put robots on the moon, it has tiny neighborhood associations inventing new methods to improve business, from delivery service to generating foot traffic.”

Synaptik, the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and the Chinatown BID were thrilled to have their Neighborhood Health Project chosen as a finalist in this year’s competition.

The Neighborhood Health Projects aims to preserve the personality of our commercial corridors and help our small businesses and community at large adapt to the demands of the 21st century economy. By optimizing data collection, simplifying business engagement and integrating predictive analytics, we can get a better understanding of the causes and effects of commercial vacancies, the impacts of past policies and events and create an open dialogue between businesses, communities and government agencies.

“With Synaptik, we can provide small businesses user-friendly tools and data insights that were previously reserved for industry heavy weights with in-house data scientists and large resource pools” said Liam Wright, CEO of Synaptik.

The Neighborhood Health Project Team was honored to have had the opportunity to share the stage with such innovative project teams. “It is great to see civic organizations take an innovative role in data intelligence to serve community constituents and local businesses. We came far in the process and hope to find alternative ways to bring this solution to New York City neighborhoods ” said Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer of Synaptik.

By Nina Robbins

Securing The Future Of ROI With Simulation Decision Support

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

EXCERPT

Simulation is simply the idea of imitating human or other environmental behaviors to test possible outcomes. It is obvious a business will want to take advantage of such Simulation technologies in order to maximize profits, reduce risks and/or reduce costs.

Simulation decision support is the backbone of many cutting edge companies these days. Such simulations are used to predict financial climates, marketing trends, purchasing behavior and other tidbits using historical and current market and environmental data.

Managing ROI

Data management is a daunting task that is not to be trusted in the hands of lose and unruly processes and technology platforms. Maximizing profit and/or reducing risks using simulated information will not be an automatic process but rather a managed task. Your business resources should be leveraged for each project needing long term ROI planning; computer simulations are just some pieces to the overall puzzle. Simulation decision support companies and platforms are not exactly a dime a dozen but should still be evaluated thoroughly before engaging.

Scaling Your Business

Modern software platforms exist to assist in the linear growth of your business initiatives. Algorithms have been produced thanks to years of market data and simulations in order to give a clear picture to your expectations and theories. Machine learning has also been rapidly improving over that past several years, making market simulations even more accurate when it comes to short and long-term growth. There is no lack of Algorithms or libraries of Data science modules, it is the ability to easily scale your core and alternative data sets into and easy to use platform that is configured to your business environment. Over the last several years these Data Science platforms, such as Synaptik.co, has allowed companies with limited resources to scale their operations to take advantage of decisions simulation processes that were once too expensive and required specialized, separate resources to manage.

Non-tech Based Departments Can No Longer Hide

All branches of companies are now so immersed in software and data that it is difficult to distinguish the IT and non-IT departments. Employees will plug away at their company designated computing resources in order to keep records for the greater good of the corporation. These various data pools and processes are rich in opportunities to enable accurate business simulations. In turn, simulation findings can be shared with different departments and partners to enrich a collaborative environment to amplify further knowledge for a greater propensity for success. It is no joking matter that big or small companies will need simulation decision support processes to ensure they not only stay competitive but excel in their growth initiatives.

Data and Knowledge Never Sleeps

In 2016, the Domo research group produced data visualizing the extent of data outputted by the world. By 2020, the group predicts that we will have a data capacity of over 44 trillion gigabytes. This overwhelming amount of data available to the average human has companies on their toes in order to grasp the wild change in our modern world. The data produced is neutral to the truth, meaning accurate and inaccurate ideas are influencing the minds of your customers, partners and stakeholders. Scaling profits and reducing risk will become an increasingly involved activity, which gives us another reason to embark on Decision Simulation processes to deal with the overwhelming amount of data and decisions needed in this fluid data rich world.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

By Joe Sticca