Managing paper documents and using an inefficient computer system can be extremely difficult, particularly when you need to share, modify, sign, or transfer important contracts or agreements quickly. If you’re looking for an organizational solution to help manage the large volume of files and documents within your organization, start by making it easier for yourself and your team by switching to cloud storage. With cloud file management, you can transfer your entire organization to a centralized location where your team can efficiently collaborate on content without wasting valuable time searching for files.
Success in using cloud services largely depends on how your teams organize files and content in the cloud. While using a cloud solution can be the answer to many of your organizational problems, it’s important to choose the right one that meets your business’s needs and keeps your content secure. Your company likely needs multiple ways of storing and organizing files, so choosing a cloud platform that doesn’t offer this flexibility could bring you right back where you started — poor organization and more downtime.
It’s important for company to have a solid management system in place. A document management system (DMS) is a strategy businesses use to store, manage, track, and control the flow of files and documents. The purpose of a DMS is to let users modify, recover, and archive documents as necessary. A DMS often uses cloud computing technology and cloud storage to enhance security and reduce the risk of lost files.
Cloud-based document management allows you to:
Digitize your files
Use security controls for verification
Enable e-signatures
Quickly share documents, no matter how large
Restrict access to certain content
Use cloud backup to restore or recover data when necessary
Enhance collaboration and accelerate workflows between on-site and remote teams
Important steps to remember about file storage.
1. Develop a folder naming system
One of the first steps you should take when developing a file system is properly naming your folders so you can organize files and retrieve them quickly when needed. If your organization has many different departments, naming your folders with the department name or relevant keywords can be helpful. While the cloud will show you the date of a file’s or folder’s creation, keeping information organized by name can help you and your team quickly search for a specific document.
2. Move your files
Drag your documents and files to their assigned folders. You can select multiple files at once to make this process easier.
3. Assign tags
Another tip for keeping track of your files within the cloud is assigning relevant metadata tags to each one. By right-clicking on any file, you can generally select the option to add descriptors that will help you properly index your files. Whether you add a subject, category, title, comment, or tag, it will enable you to later search for keywords within your content.
4. Create subfolders
Managing a large number of files and documents can be stressful if you spend half the time trying to find them, so creating subfolders within your folders can eliminate this struggle. Subfolders make it easier to find a document within a folder of the same topic or assignment. Keep in mind, you should use the same naming system for your subfolders as your original folder.
You can read more about Keeping Cloud Organized here.
Nexlogica has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
The term Big Data describes a massive volume of data that cannot be stored and processed by the traditional data storage / processing systems. Lately, data is generated at a rapid pace and in huge volume. It is being used by businesses toprocessandanalyzeto uncover hidden patterns and discover useful insights which add values to the business.
Big Data is commonly classified into three different categories.
Structured Data
Semi-Structured Data
Unstructured Data
Structured Data is characterized by the well-defined structure or schema. It follows a set of rules and constraints. Structured data usually consists of well-defined columns and stored in databases. The popular storage and processing system is called Database Management System (DBMS) or Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) such as MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 etc.
Semi-Structured Data is another form of structure data which follows only few characteristics of structured data and it does not comply with the formal structure of RDBMS data model. But the semi-structured data is also popular and useful in data processing such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Comma Separated Values (CSV) file etc.
Unstructured data is completely undefined which means it does not follow any schema of formal data models. These type of data does not have any consistent format or fixed format. The commonly used unstructured data is image, audio, and video files.
Metaverse is the next evolution of digital technologies. It includes 3D virtualization and will transform digital technologies in the next 5–10 years. It is a collective virtual space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. In other words, it is device-independent and is not owned by a single vendor. It is an independent virtual economy, enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
A Metaverse represents a combinatorial innovation, as it requires multiple technologies and trends to function. Contributing tech capabilities include augmented reality (AR), flexible work styles, head-mounted displays (HMDs), an AR cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and spatial technologies.
There is a lot of excitement around Metaverse, much of it driven by technology companies preemptively claiming to be Metaverse companies, or creating Metaverses to enhance or augment the digital and physical realities of people. Moreover, activities that currently take place in siloed environments will eventually take place in a single Metaverse, such as:
Purchasing outfits and accessories for online avatars
Buying digital land and constructing virtual homes
Participating in a virtual social experience
Shopping in virtual malls via immersive commerce
Using virtual classrooms to experience immersive learning
Buying digital art, collectibles and assets (NFTs)
Interacting with digital humans for onboarding employees, customer service, sales and other business interactions
Elements of a Metaverse
Gartner is a technology research and consulting company. It described the elements of a Metaverse in the below diagram.
Gartner expects that by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse for work, shopping, education, social media and/or entertainment.
On September 28–30th, Nexlogica participated in the first Hackathon for Good to help out The Nature Conservancy.
The Nature Conservancy’s content has exponentially grown as time progresses. As employees leave to continue on their career journey at other places, TNC is left with data that is hard to parse through and stale user accounts that take up licenses. This has caused loss of valuable research that is vital to TNC.
The Teams were tasked with finding a way to make employee transitions more scalable by doing two things :
Migrate off-boarded employees data to another place, followed by deactivating the user account
Decide what, if any, of the data should be kept rather than storing it forever
We are happy to announce, that our Nexlogica Team won the prize for
The Best Use of Box!
We built a custom UI for onboarding and off boarding employees, integrated AI tools to gather data insights, designed an easy to use content migrator, and used almost every tool Box can offer their enterprise customers.
Congratulations to all Teams ! We can’t wait to participate in next Box Hackathon!
You can read more about First Box Hackathon for Good here.
Nexlogica has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
Over the past decade, business intelligence has been revolutionized. Data exploded and became big. And just like that, we all gained access to the cloud. Spreadsheets finally took a backseat to actionable and insightful data visualizations and interactive business dashboards. The rise of self-service analytics democratized the data product chain. Suddenly advanced analytics wasn’t just for the analysts.
Read on to see our top 10 business intelligence trends in 2022:
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science aiming to make machines execute what is usually done by complex human intelligence. This is a trend that is wildly being covered by Gartner in their latest Strategic Technology Trends report, combining AI with engineering and hyperautomation, and concentrating on the level of security in which AI risks developing vulnerable points of attacks. It is expected that in the coming year’s AI will evolve into a more responsible and scalable technology as organizations will require a lot more from AI-based systems.
Data Security
Data and information security have been on everyone’s lips in 2021, and they continue to buzz the world in 2022. The implementation of privacy regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU, the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) in the USA, and the LGPD (General Personal Data Protection Law) in Brazil have set building blocks for data security and management of users’ personal information.
Moreover, the recent overturn by the European Court of Justice of the legal framework called Data Privacy Shield hasn’t made software companies’ life much easier. The Shield was a legal framework that enabled companies to transfer data from the EU to the USA but, with recent legal developments causing the invalidation of the process, companies that have their headquarters in the US don’t have the right to transfer any of the EU data subjects.
Data Discovery/Visualization
Data discovery has increased its impact in the last year. A survey conducted by the Business Application Research Center listed data discovery in the top 4 business intelligence trends by the importance hierarchy for 2022. BI practitioners steadily show that the empowerment of business users is a strong and consistent trend.
Essentially, data discovery is the process of collecting data from various internal and external sources and using advanced analytics and visualizations to consolidate all the information. This allows businesses to keep every relevant stakeholder engaged with the data by empowering them to analyze and manipulate the information in an intuitive way and extract actionable insights. To achieve this, businesses of all sizes turn to modern solutions such as business intelligence tools that offer data integration, interactive visualizations, a user-friendly interface, and the flexibility to work with big amounts of data in an efficient and intuitive way.
Data Quality Management
Data quality management ensures that companies can make the right data-driven decisions by using the correct data for their analytical purpose. This means there is no definitive truth about the way businesses can measure the quality of the data as this solely depends on the context. That said, there are guidelines to follow in order to ensure a successful data management process, some of them include data being accurate, consistent, complete, timely, and compliant. Meaning, no duplicate or missing values, no outdated data that doesn’t represent the required timeline, and no data that is not consistent. A simple example of data consistency would be that the sum of employees in each department does not exceed the total number of employees in that organization.
Predictive & Prescriptive Analytics Tools
Predictive analytics is the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to forecast future probabilities. It’s an extension of data mining that refers only to past data. Predictive analytics includes estimated future data and therefore always includes the possibility of errors from its definition, although those errors steadily decrease as software that manages large volumes of data today becomes smarter and more efficient. Predictive analytics indicates what might happen in the future with an acceptable level of reliability, including a few alternative scenarios and risk assessment. Applied to business, predictive analytics is used to analyze current data and historical facts in order to better understand customers, products, and partners and to identify potential risks and opportunities for a company.
Real-time Data & Analytics
The need for real-time data has tremendously evolved this year and will continue to do so as one of the data analytics trends for 2022. We have seen since the pandemic arrived, that the needs for real-time and accurate updates are critical in developing proper strategies to respond to such unfortunate situations. Some countries have used data to make the best possible decisions, and companies followed to ensure survival in these uncertain times. Real-time access to data has become a norm in everyday life, not just for businesses, but the general public as well, where we could see press conferences filled with the most recent information, graphs, and statistics that have defined some of the strategies against the pandemic. But not only; creating ad hoc analysis has enabled businesses to stay on top of changes and adapt to immense challenges that this year has brought.
Collaborative Business Intelligence
BI tools make sharing easier in generating automated reports that can be scheduled at specific times and to specific people. For instance; they enable you to set up business intelligence alerts, share public or embedded dashboards with a flexible level of interactivity. All these possibilities are accessible on all devices which enhances the decision-making and problem-solving processes, critical for today’s ever-changing environment. This is especially necessary now that the pandemic has forced businesses to shift to a home office dynamic in which collaboration needs to be supported by the right tools more than ever.
Collaborative information, information enhancement, and collaborative decision-making are the key focus of new BI solutions. But collaborative BI does not only remain around some documents’ exchanges or updates. It has to track the various progress of meetings, calls, e-mails exchanges, and ideas collection. More recent insights predict that collaborative business intelligence will become more connected to greater systems and larger sets of users. The team’s performance will be affected, and the decision-making process will thrive in this new concept.
Data Literacy
As data becomes the foundation of strategic decisions for businesses of all sizes, the ability to understand this data and use it as a collaborative tool that everyone in the organization can use becomes critical for success. That said, data literacy will be one of the relevant data analytics trends to look out for in 2022.
Data literacy is defined as the ability to understand, read, write, and communicate data in a specific context. This means understanding the techniques and methods used to analyze the data as well as the tools and technologies implemented. According to Gartner, poor data literacy is listed as the second-biggest roadblock to the success of the CDO’s office, and it adds that by 2023 data literacy will become essential in driving business value.
Data Automation
Business intelligence topics wouldn’t be complete without data (analysis) automation. In the last decade, we saw so much data produced, stored, and ready to process that companies and organizations were seriously looking for modern data automation solutions to tackle massive volumes of information that has been collected. A survey by KDNuggets predicts that in the next decade, data science tasks will be automated, hence, this is one of the trends in business intelligence that we need to keep an eye on since we don’t know when it will exactly happen.
Business intelligence has brought many automation possibilities and in 2022, we will see even more. Long-standing barriers between data scientists and business users are being slowly mixed into a one-stop-shop for any data requirement a company might have – from collecting, analyzing, monitoring, reporting, and sharing findings. A scenario might include intelligent reporting – predictive analytics and automated reports increase the business users’ capabilities to automate data on their own, without the help of the IT department. On the other hand, data scientists still will manage complex analysis where manual scripting and coding are necessary.
Embedded Analytics
Whether you need to create a sales report or send multiple dashboards to clients, embedded analytics is becoming a standard in business operations, and in 2022, we will see even more companies adopting it. Departments and company owners are looking for professional solutions to present their data without the need to build their own software. By simply white labeling the chosen application, organizations can achieve a polished presentation and reporting which they can offer to consumers.
More than just embedding a dashboard or BI features to an application, embedding analytics allows for collaboration by keeping every single stakeholder involved. By providing clients and employees the possibility to manipulate the data in a well-known environment you facilitate the extraction of insights from every area of your business. This makes it one of the fastest-growing business intelligence trends from this list.
You can read more about Analytics And Business Intelligence Trends For 2022 here.
Nexlogica has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
