Creativity in Business – Take Action on Innovative Ideas

Identifying creative ideas is a great way to grow your business. Using innovation contests and other activities, your organization can and develop a culture of creativity that generates plenty of creative ideas. These creative ideas can be developed into innovations that provide considerable value to the business.

However, creating a list of innovative ideas is not enough. You must take action!

Here are several ways to start taking action:

1. Evaluate the ideas on your list. Get a group of people from different parts of your business (different job functions) and review the ideas submitted. Perform a cost-benefit analysis on the most promising ideas. Initially, look for ideas that can be implemented quickly and are likely to produce a significant result to the bottom line. Continue reading

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Combine All Your Data in One Place – 5 Benefits to Using a Dashboard Solution

The best business decisions are made when you can look at the problem from every angle. You need all the data in one place, in a simple, intuitive format. That’s why dashboard solutions make perfect business sense. Dashboard solutions pull essential information together about your business’s performance in daily reports. Executive dashboards are highly visual reports that provide a snapshot of your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs) in a user-friendly way. Dashboards combine charts, tables, gauges, and maps in a single, at-a-glance view to provide the crucial details you need to react quickly in any situation and make the best-informed business decision.

Dashboard software that uses Excel automation to generate high-impact executive dashboards is key to your company’s business intelligence solution. Non-technical business professionals can quickly and easily create and manage executive dashboards using the same Excel technology they already know and love. These dashboard reports automatically extract data from databases and accounting and ERP systems and then format this information into graphically rich, succinct Excel reports with dashboard charts. These daily reports provide the same data in the same format across your enterprise, so that decision-makers throughout your company are on the same page. Continue reading

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Which Comes First – Technical Skills, Process Or Relationship?

Ask any technologist what comes first in building quality systems and the answer will be technical skills, process and (maybe) business relationship. After interviewing several CIOs and Business Applications Executives, they will tell you the same thing. They were successful because they used the latest technical skills while following a process to deliver the system.

Delving deeper into the specifics of these successful projects, I uncovered a similar pattern. Yes, the individual’s technical skills and the process they followed were important. However, some of the projects didn’t follow a defined process but were still successful. Some of the projects didn’t use the latest and greatest technology and were still successful. What these projects had in common with those that did was the relationship the technologists had with the business (user) community. Continue reading

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