The most Important Elements of Business Analytics

Five key elements of a modern business analytics strategy can help businesses position themselves for growth in the new economy and continue to work and be smarter, especially in managing costs, improving profit, identifying new opportunities, driving cash flow and managing risk for more effective decision-making.

1. Scorecards/dashboards.
By using scorecards and dashboards, executives are able to monitor data efficiently, better understand performance gaps and quickly drive opportunities with more strategic decision-making.

Understanding how business is performing against predetermined targets is crucial. As companies become increasingly agile, executives simply do not have the time to sift through stacks of reports to discover how their business is performing. Business leaders can look to measurement tools, such as scorecards and dashboards, to monitor data and help manage strategy and performance goals.

There are different scorecard types that provide distinct characteristics to help decision-makers, including those focused on strategy management, business process performance management and basic performance monitoring. Regardless of structure, their impact on decision-making is even more significant.

Scorecards let executives link individual and team performance to organizational strategies. This helps employees understand at a glance how their individual roles drive company-wide performance. With digital scorecards that are tied to key financial and operational data, business leaders don’t have to sift through spreadsheets or paper-based reports. They are effectively able to monitor and manage their strategies as well as make smarter decisions to execute company objectives.

2. Reporting and analysis.
Reporting and analysis abilities allow decision-makers to assess and communicate how their company is performing in the industry and take immediate action accordingly.

Reporting and analysis helps executives see how they are operating in different regions or across product categories, as well as better understand the state of their market sector and industry competition.

With business analytics, Web-based reporting sits on top of core transaction systems so decision-makers can take immediate action on recent financial or operational information. Reporting and analysis creates a common context for decision-making across departments and staff levels and helps companies make data more actionable.

3. Financial performance management.
Deep insight into financial and operational data helps companies streamline business operations in order to increase profitability and sustainability.

Business analytics software for financial performance management helps executives streamline the complex process of tough decision-making by enabling users to evaluate financial results across countries, currencies, general ledger systems and legal entities. This deep insight helps finance make smarter decisions about which assets, resources, initiatives, locations, products or customer relationships may no longer be sustainable.

Armed with detailed financial analytics, business leaders can quickly evaluate how results change over time, in different regions and across various product categories. The ability to identify key financial and operational trends is always vital. By drilling down to transactional-level detail, trends can be spotted more easily so decision-makers can better understand resource requirements and plan accordingly.

4. Continue the planning cycle.
Replacing rigid planning cycles with business analytics software enables businesses to build intelligent plans for future development and growth.

Business analytics software for enterprise planning can help companies replace and revamp rigid annual budgeting and planning processes that tend to make minimal impact on business growth. This type of business analytics technology fosters continuous planning on a monthly, weekly or daily basis, positioning companies to achieve higher performance in both strong and weak economies.

With real-time visibility into up-to-date data, executives can create rolling forecasts that consider a broad range of potential future scenarios. This type of what-if analysis enables business leaders to develop intelligent action plans for variable future outcomes, thus boosting the agility and responsiveness of the company.

5. Continuous monitoring of performance targets.
Monitoring performance targets on an ongoing basis lays the foundation for future growth, providing organizations with a realistic performance outlook based on actual business and industry developments.

Companies should not seek shelter from the stormy clouds brought on by the recession, but rather take careful, intelligent steps to better manage costs, improve efficiencies, reallocate resources and streamline supply chains so that the foundation for future growth is established. Instead of setting targets at specific numbers, company decision-makers need to link performance targets to events, trends and risk factors.

This allows for more realistic performance targets based on actual business and industry developments and provides more flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions. The strategy will require a commitment to rid the company of inefficient processes in favor of intelligent systems capable of driving continuous performance.

For the past four years, BI software, a key component of the business analytics market, has ranked as the number one priority of executive managers surveyed by Gartner. Why? Because choosing the right strategy, executing against it, and ensuring you’re on the right path demands the access to the information and insight that modern business analytics delivers.

This is especially true during uncertain economic times, businesses of all sizes need to analyze operations and performance in an effort to identify the best ways to improve business processes, reduce or optimise enterprise costs and improve overall enterprise workforce effectiveness.

Smart companies need a modern, intelligent business analytics strategy that gives them the ability to understand past performance, get an immediate pulse on what is happening now, and both plan and model the future to gain more predictability and control.

This type of strategy is driven by the business in collaboration with the IT department and combines the elements of scorecards/dashboards, reporting and analysis, financial performance management, continuous planning and performance targets.

Together, this modern business analytics strategy fosters better control over information and visibility into how the new intelligence gained will impact the business value chain. Moreover, an inclusive business analytics strategy is pervasive across lines of business and employee roles, helps organizations find opportunity amidst economic turmoil, accurately measures efficiencies, streamlines the decision-making process, revolutionizes planning, budgeting and forecasting and lays a solid foundation for sustainable 21st century growth.

In Liquid and Air, Scientists Find Order Among the Chaos - NYTimes.com

In Liquid and Air, Scientists Find Order Among the Chaos - NYTimes.com

Assisted by instruments that can track in fine detail how parcels of fluid move, and by low-cost computers that can crunch vast amounts of data quickly, researchers have found hidden structures beyond Monterey Bay, structures that explain why aircraft meet unexpected turbulence, why the air flow around a car causes drag and how blood pumps from the heart's ventricles. In December, the journal Chaos will highlight the research under way to track the moving skeletons embedded in complex flows, known as Lagrangian coherent structures.

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Be Aware! Voice and Data Can Be Spied on

Attackers seeking to do harm or mischief to your networks work with an ever expanding arsenal of tools that sometimes seem to be the stuff of spy fiction, but they are all too real.

Here are 10 Spy style cloak-and-dagger ways, legal and illegal, to secretly tap into networks and computers to capture data and conversations.

1. Wireless keyboard eavesdropping: Remote-exploit.org has released an open source hardware design and accompanying software for a device that captures then decrypts signals from wireless keyboards. The device uses a wireless receiver that can be concealed in clothing or disguised as a common object that could be left on a desk near a PC to pick up signals.

Called Keykeriki, the technology targets 27MHz wireless keyboards to exploit insecurities that remote-expoit.org discovered earlier. The company plans to build and sell the hardware.

2. Wired keyboard eavesdropping: Electromagnetic pulses that keyboards make to signal what key is being hit travel through the grounding system of the keyboard and the computer itself as well as the ground for the electrical wiring in the building where the computer is plugged in.

Probes placed on the ground for the electric wiring can pick up these electromagnetic fluctuations, and they can be captured and translated into characters. The potential for this type of eavesdropping has been known for decades, and many experts believe spy agencies have refined techniques that make it practical. Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco, researchers for network security consultancy Inverse Path, are presenting their quick-and-dirty research on the topic at this year's Black Hat USA conference in the hopes of sparking more public research of these techniques.

3. Laptop eavesdropping via lasers: Bouncing lasers off laptops and capturing the vibrations made as keys are struck give attackers enough data to deduce what is being typed. Each key makes a unique set of vibrations different from any other. The space bar makes an even more unique set, Barisani and Bianco say.

Language analysis software can help determine which set of vibrations correspond to which key, and if the attacker knows the language being used, the message can be exposed, they say.

4. Commercial keyloggers: Early keyloggers were devices attached in-line with keyboards, but they advanced to software tools that grab keystrokes and store or send them to an attack server. Commercial versions have the software loaded on memory sticks that can dump the software on a computer and then be reinserted later to download the collected data.

5. Cell phones as remotely activated bugs: Software loaded onto certain models of cell phones can silence the ringers and cut off the light displays that would normally be triggered when calls are made to them. The caller can then listen in on conversations in the room where the phone is located.

According to press reports, the FBI received court permission to use this technique to spy on suspected Mafia members in New York.

6. Cell phone SIM card compromise: If attackers can get possession of a cell phone briefly, they can use commercially available software to download and read SIM cards and their store of phone numbers, call logs, SMS messages, photos and so on.

For instance PhoneFile Pro is software on a USB stick that claims to enable both the download and the display of the data.

7. Law enforcement wiretapping based on voice print: Phone company voice switches include software that can search all conversations going through it for voices that match sets of voiceprints. Whenever the switch makes a match, it can trigger a recording of the conversation and alert law enforcement officials, says James Atkinson, an expert in technical surveillance countermeasures.

The feature is designed to support communications assistance for law enforcement (CALEA) -- the law that requires phone companies to provide wiretapping access under court order to specific communications traffic.

8. Remote capture of computer data: Under a sketchy technique called Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV), the FBI has remotely tracked down data about individual computers.

Details of the technology have never been publicly revealed, but they were used to track down high-school students who sent e-mail bomb threats. CIPAV grabs IP and MAC addresses, running processes, visited Web sites, versions of operating systems, registered owner and logging of computers the target computers connect to. It is believed the software that does this is dropped in via exploiting instant messaging.

9. Cable TV as an exploitable network: Because most cable TV networks are essentially hubbed, any node can monitor any other node's traffic, says James Atkinson, an expert in technical surveillance countermeasures. By and large security is rudimentary and the encryption used could be hacked by someone with basic technical skills and readily available decryption tools, he says.

10. Cell phone monitoring: Commercially available software claims to capture cell phone conversations and texting. Attackers need to get physical access to the phone to upload the software that enables this.

There are several commercial brands on the market, but there are also online complaints that the software doesn't work as advertised or is more complicated to use than the vendors let on.