The TIBCO Blog

Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership for IT Projects

May 16, 2012 By Kenan Frager Leave a Comment

At global, dynamic organizations, like commercial banks, IT undertakes large and small projects every week. This becomes increasingly more complex and increasingly more expensive for companies when implementing software solutions across regions and through language barriers. TIBCO lowers the costs for every new project by integrating diverse enterprise systems. Having a uniform, centralized dataflow allows IT to have greater access to the easy-to-utilize information they need to implement new software solutions.

Taiwan’s largest global bank, award-winning Chinatrust Commercial Bank, used TIBCO in their expansion to the huge financial markets of Singapore, New York, Hong Kong, Japan, and India. You can see how IT would have problems standardizing a single service like loans with such a diverse customer base. New projects at Chinatrust have cost savings as high as 30 to 40 percent for any given project, with a service re-use rate at 30 to 35 percent.

Political Loyalty: What Politicians Can Learn from Retailers (Part 1)

May 11, 2012 By Robin Gilthorpe Leave a Comment

The recent elections in France and Greece have been watched with great interest by both politicos and investors. These choices resonate loudly across the oceans. “Political Loyalty” may sound like an oxymoron, or the punchline to a joke, depending on your cynicism level and the news headlines today, but it is real and it could have a major impact on the next electoral cycle. Two huge factors will shape the next several elections in the U.S. and beyond:

The application of technology is accelerating. After precious little innovation from the 15th century to the 20th, successive escalations – TV, robo-calling, etc. are leading to attempts to micro-target messages. Engaging the Millennial population among not just voters, but also party supporters and campaign staff will demand a comprehensive approach incorporating mobile and social capabilities. Otherwise, voter turnout rates are doomed to continue their long decline.
The game is more and more about the “middle:” the candidates’ polarizing rhetoric and policy mixes across spheres of social/economic/foreign policy have led to a dramatic increase in independent voters (known to political science geeks as NPP or DTS voters). Even here in California, with a lot of opinions flying around, self-identified independent voters are now over 21% of the electorate…

With all that said, let’s take a look at the landscape, what retailers can teach politicians, and how to address the two big challenges mentioned above

THE LANDSCAPE

The mechanics of the political process may seem very foreign to many who have spent their career in the commercial world. I, too, pursued a career in business, but grew up in a political environment, so I see the parallels. A political campaign is, at some level, a conversion marketing program: you try and deal with people along the full spectrum from “don’t like” to “don’t know” to “like,” “support,” “advocate,, “organize” and “fundraise”…and of course the goal is to move them from the former categories to the latter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Government, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Social, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Political Loyalty

Big Data Requires an Extreme Information Management Makeover

May 10, 2012 By Spotfire Blogging Team Leave a Comment

Many companies have been struggling for years to stay afloat amidst the deluge of data created by internal systems.

But now, big data or extreme data is pouring into organizations in higher volumes, faster, from a wider variety of data sources, and in more formats than ever before.

Big data dangles a large expanse of promise, but it requires business analytics as the foundation of an extreme information makeover for organizations to exploit the potential it offers.

For example, companies that use predictive analytics achieve higher returns by tapping into big data, according to Nucleus Research. With an average ROI of 1,209%, companies achieve higher returns with projects such as web-based customer sentiment tracking and demand forecasting.

As the name implies, big data means a vast volume of structured and unstructured data that companies must decipher to bolster management decision making.

In a separate research report, Nucleus notes that expanding the volume of data that can be examined with analytics allows employees to detect conditions that impact a large number of transactions, but can’t be observed without automated analytics. For instance, an auto manufacturer could examine parts purchases in its servicing industry to detect flaws or quality problems before they escalate to a public relations or safety crisis, Nucleus notes.

In addition to volume, extreme data is characterized by velocity; it streams in as fast as a customer can Tweet a product complaint. By using analytics to quickly analyze large data sets, a company can uncover problems and get actionable insight while its employees can still do something to fix the problem.

“Many consumers are likely to Tweet or blog about a product long before they share their opinions with a call center representative,” Nucleus notes. “Customer churn prevention also requires timely reactions based on the accurate view of leading metrics.”

Research firm Gartner Inc. has described “extreme information management” as the concept that a company’s current information infrastructure needs to be managed, primarily because of the fast growth of data and the types of data that must be analyzed to fuel revenue and market share growth. By 2015, (continued…)

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: analytics, Big Data

Healthcare: You Can’t Improve What You Can’t Measure

May 8, 2012 By Chris Taylor 7 Comments

As shown in Healthcare Reform That Can’t Be Stopped, the Toyota Production System has found a home in healthcare. The Wisconsin-based TPS pioneer, ThedaCare, has been employing Toyota’s industrial efficiency principles in its hospitals to great effect for more than 10 years. Thedacare is now seeing great interest from other organizations, as the healthcare industry moves to reap the rewards of its move to digitize information. So much interest, in fact, that it has created the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value to help other organizations realize the promise of continuous performance improvement. Its head, former ThedaCare CEO Dr. John Toussaint, doesn’t mince words when he talks about what’s bringing all those organizations to his door — and it’s not federal legislation.

“Healthcare performance was and still is unreliable,” he says flatly. “Those who are honest about what they’re doing recognize that. Twelve years ago, ThedaCare compared manufacturing and healthcare quality and found healthcare to be far worse: 90,000 to 100,000 defects per million opportunities [versus the three defects per million norm in manufacturing]. That’s quite frankly still how U.S. healthcare performs. A 2010 HHS Study said we were killing 15,000 Medicare patients per month with medical errors. The NIH’s Crossing the Quality Chasm in 1999 showed the same thing. When you peel back the onion, we’re doing really lousy; maybe it has even gotten worse. Those of us who have been in the business of quality improvement have been trying to understand why that is and implement processes to change that.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare, Industries

21st Century Global Banking Finds New Success Factors

May 3, 2012 By Amitava Kundu Leave a Comment

The globalization of banks is not a new business model for revenue maximization; however over years of geographic expansion, banks have understood that maintaining quality of service standards for a consistent customer experience is the secret to success. Customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and profitability in global operations have surpassed growth as the primary objective, especially in the aftermath of recession. Paramount to keeping customers coming back to your bank, especially today’s tech-savvy consumers who cannot live without the internet, smart phones, and tablets – is the ease of doing business that matches the intuitive ease of the consumer web.

Shift from Being a Technology Supplier to an Experience Provider

May 2, 2012 By Lindsey Ashjian 2 Comments

We all know we’re being sold something every minute of every day. Those who use subliminal messaging to influence their target market may be more sly, and more expensive, but aren’t necessarily more successful. Your product or service’s true value should speak for itself. This often involves informing your consumer to make an educated decision to purchase what you’re selling, because they “get it,” not because you told, cajoled, or hyped them to buy.

The TIBCO–hosted, vertically oriented innovation sessions open dialogue regarding innovation. We provide a forum for customers and prospects to share their challenges and successes, so others (including us!) can learn from them. The better you know your customers and peers, the better experience you can provide.

Discover how TIBCO shifts the conversation beyond single products to a shared culture of solution discovery with the latest addition to our Global Innovation Series, captured at the HIMSS Healthcare IT Conference. We learned what’s hot in healthcare straight from some of the industry’s most respected thought leaders.

Filed Under: Healthcare, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Alameda County Medical Center, Cognizant, Dr. Howard Landa, Dr. Praveen Soti, Gary Ferguson, Global Innovation Series, Healthcare, HIMSS, Innovation, Peter Ragusa, Ted Dellavechia, TIBCO, VoiceHIT

Dealing with Imperfect Data? 5 Things to Consider

April 30, 2012 By Dave Chamberlain Leave a Comment

When customers are looking for ways of dealing with imperfect (substitute your own expletive here) data, there are five major factors that should be considered. You will find many competing claims about approaches and algorithms, but at the end of the day, my (completely unbiased) view about evaluation criteria is:

1. First and foremost, it’s all about accuracy – here we could talk about specificity and sensitivity analysis and other statistical mumbo-jumbo, but for simplicity, let’s just focus on accuracy – that is measuring how close the system can come to reaching the same conclusions as a domain expert when faced with the same data.

2. It’s about scalability – dealing with big data. How easily can the system you select deal with increasingly large volumes of data and workloads?

3. To any organization doing business in and across country or cultural boundaries, being able to deal with any type of data in any language should be a key criteria. Systems are global and need to deal with data about many different types of entities – not just customers and product data – and do so in a way that is independent of language.

4. Data comes from so many different systems and sources that being able to easily configure requests to deal with whatever comes along is a must-have. So make sure you review the options provided to fine tune requests which can easily achieve the desired results.

5. Finally, of course, is seeing how easily the system can be integrated with existing and future applications, processes and tools that run your business. This involves looking at two main areas: What native language support is provided? How is that integration achieved? Then, make sure it will work effectively with your ESB, SOA, BPM andCEP products.

Filed Under: BPM, CEP, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Retail, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Imperfect Data, TIBCO Patterns

The Healthcare Reform that Can’t Be Stopped

April 27, 2012 By Chris Taylor Leave a Comment

There are few more personal, passionate, and political topics than healthcare. The reasons for this are clear: Healthcare spending has reached 17% of the U.S. GDP, outcomes are worse than in other developed countries, and an attempt to fix the system through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) now sits in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. But regardless of ACA’s legal prognosis, the Pandora’s Box of true healthcare reform has already been opened — and it happened before most of us realized.

It happened in the throes of the recent Great Recession when Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the bailout). Nearly $800 billion was targeted to create new jobs, save existing jobs, and spur economic activity. What many don’t realize is that as part of those funds, the incentives created to digitize medical records were massive — amounting to $40,000 to $65,000 per physician and $11 million per hospital for the “meaningful use” of health information technology.

Just as important as the financial carrot was the accompanying stick wielded by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, the largest single payer in the United States — the threat to reduce payments to physicians and hospitals by 1% per year if they fail to submit invoices electronically. For an industry typically operating in the low single digits of profitability, this is a heavy stick indeed, prompting many organizations not to wait to see if the bill gets struck down before taking the necessary steps to comply. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare, Industries, Two-Second Advantage