ChristianSteven BI Blog

The business world is rapidly changing to adapt new strategies for maintaining competitiveness and enhancing revenue streams. As the global community continues to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, organizational leaders strive to develop a foundation for their organizations to thrive in a new world. Unfortunately, the pre-pandemic workplace can no longer address these new challenges. Workforce issues require new strategies and data-driven approaches.

The pandemic has accelerated the implementation of new working ways and the adoption of digital technology across industries. However, many companies also face a workforce challenge following the effects of the pandemic and the great turnover experienced in the past year. An essential counter mechanism to overcome these challenges is transforming toward a data-driven workforce to maintain competitiveness for the future. 

Read on to learn how Power BI can address current workforce issues and the headwinds of changing culture.

Leverage Data to Support Your Business Vision

Economic uncertainty and volatility characterize the current global business environment.  In good times, corporations scramble to meet demand and add capacity while standing out from the competition, and at the same time feeling particularly attracted to a growing and robust market.

In challenging times, businesses struggle to encourage reluctant clients and control costs while retaining sufficient resources and personnel to respond promptly when the market evolves and recovers. Whether the market conditions are good or bad, there are multiple opportunities for corporations to leverage their preparedness to remain competitive and maintain steady growth.

Having a clear business vision is one of the initial steps to staying competitive during a recession. A clear business vision helps you stay agile and secure and keeps your customers returning.

For many organizations, the question that keeps their executives up at night is deciding on their IT spending strategy for the next two years. Recent reports indicate that Microsoft is reducing staff in areas such as consulting and partner solutions while adding staff in other -- more technical -- areas. At the same time, Gartner suggests that a tight labor market, rising inflation, and a possible recession have more companies looking to outsource IT to stay within budget. Is there a right strategy?

The best strategy is a data-driven one. Management must look at technology trends to decide what technologies to implement. They have to evaluate the cost and determine what resources are needed to achieve a successful deployment. Without data, executives are only guessing at what the impact of their IT spending strategy will be.

Did you know that our brains are biased towards the negative? That negative orientation is probably why we are more familiar with a vicious cycle than a virtuous one. Yet, a virtuous circle also known as the snowball effect is a recurring cycle of events that reinforces itself through feedback resulting in continuous improvement. It is the process that underpins Amazon's Flywheel. 

In 2001, Jeff Bezos sketched what he called the virtuous cycle on a napkin. Data is collected during each customer experience. That data is used to refine the customer profile. The more a consumer uses Amazon, the more data is assembled ultimately creating a personalized experience for millions of users. Each iteration moves a potential buyer through the sales funnel until Amazon is recommending products customers didn't know they needed. 

Amazon's feedback loop allowed the company to inform its product design. As the company interjected data earlier in its customer experience design, the better the end results and at a lower cost to the company. Without data, Amazon would not realize its virtuous cycle.

More organizations are moving to distributed architectures for their computer networks. The traditional monolithic systems do not provide the flexibility, resiliency, and scalability that distributed computing offers. With the growing number of users, devices, and data that reside outside the security perimeter, organizations have to re-evaluate how to secure the edges of their networks without restricting access to critical data for Power BI Reporting.