Webb Insights: Business & Technology

Today's world is focused on the "New" - new ways to communicate, new interfaces, new interactions, and new technologies. We continue to innovate with things, but in this constant race, it's easy to forget about humanity - about empathy - about communicating simply, and concisely. One of the biggest buzzwords lately is "Analytics." In honor of this post, let me quickly define what I'm talking about: Analytics: A process and result of describing, interrogating, and understanding information. Types of analytics include: Network and Relationship Segmentation / Clustering Behavior Geospatial Prediction and Simulation Text and Unstructured Visualization: An art-form we use to communicate insightful information. For the examples above, let's look at the 2018 Olympics, which, at the time of this writing, are taking place. Below are some types of analytics, with an example of how they might be visualized. Networks and Relationship

I feel fortunate to have been able to attend and present at the sold-out, two-day, Power BI World Tour  in Chicago. As a presenter, it was a great opportunity to share knowledge, experience, tips and tricks related related to Power BI. If you came to my session - thank you.  To me - these conferences aren't just about the presenters, or the sponsors, or the attendees. They shine in the way passionate people come together and share ideas. As such, I want to discuss my experience - notably, the amount of new things I learned. Events like these are great ways to learn more about features, get insights related to roadmap, and most importantly, learn how peers are using the technology. What follows are 10 things I learned: Ten Things Learned at the Power BI World Tour: 1. Self Service BI is changing the way companies work together  I met many Excel users evolving from VLOOKUPs to PowerPivot to Power BI. These business users talked about the ability to go

In 2017, Shadow IT has become a cloudier issue, pun intended People and teams work differently than they did 15, 10, even 5 years ago. Employees want to work from anywhere, chat, collaborate and share information quickly and easily - and on any device. At the same time, they are creating, storing and accessing data exponentially more than they used to. IDC estimates that the amount of data created doubles every two years. The new rules for digital business impose new requirements for new applications, often of the cloud variety. Managing these factors and associated expectations present new challenges for information security. Shadow IT, the use of unauthorized technology applications within an organization's application environment, can be likened to a Trojan horse. Once in use, "shadow" applications can have access to sensitive, confidential and or proprietary data, yet not adhere to any DLP policies you have in place. Worse yet, when not properly identifi

There are many success stories discussing the benefit of business intelligence. Increasing efficiency, fostering innovation and discovering new markets are just a few use cases for BI. Particularly, the ability for business stakeholders to easily use and analyze data for decision support is often cited as a catalyst for growth. This last phenomenon is best described as Self Service BI - an approach to data analytics that enables business users to access and work with data related to the organization's business, industry, customers, competitors, partners and external factors as well as benchmarks, KPIs and metrics. Indeed, Self Service BI applications from Tableau, Birst, and DOMO, as well as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP - claim the ability to help even the world’s largest organizations unleash the power of their data. These same vendors, always keen to marketing opportunities, have coined "Self Service BI" as the next wave in business strategy. Vendors are quick to point o

As Election Day 2016 unfolds, I've been captivated by the number of opinions, tweets, hashtags, posts, photos and snapchats of election coverage. As a citizen however, I feel that some very important information hasn't always been in forefront: Do you get "Time Off" to vote? What are the general polling times by State? What are some important details about the Legislation? As such, I've put together a quick visualization that can be a starting place for your rights and when you should get to the polls. Check out the visualization below, designed to give you a "click" glance of information when you hover over your state. Remember, voting is your right. Cheers! #ElectionDay #Vote

This year, I had the incredible opportunity to attend Dreamforce 2016 ( many thanks to Marc Benioff ) Previously, I put together a list of lingering questions around Dreamforce 2016 and the various announcements circulating around Salesforce Einstein, and the Quip and Demandware acquisitions, respectively. I'd like to respond to these questions with insights I learned from the conference as well as my outlook for the future. Overall, I came away impressed with the incredible investments Salesforce has made not with any one solution but in the platform as a whole. Salesforce Einstein: What is it? Why does it matter? First, I would be remiss to not talk about Salesforce's word of the year: Einstein . Einstein is "formally" introduced at Dreamforce 2016 Einstein is Salesforce's grand vision of an applied big data platform underlying all of its solutions. It is the culmination of Salesforce's strategic acquisitions, hiring of exceptiona