Meaningful data can bring your business to life
How is the new services economy changing business? At Certinia Community Live in Las Vegas, Jon Reed of Diginomica sat down with analysts and industry leaders to discuss everything from disruption and cloud ERP to the changing worlds of financial management and professional services.
In this second installment in our series of Diginomica interviews, Farnaz Bengali (Vice President, Applications at MicroStrategy) shares how her company has hit its stride, with MicroStrategy increasing headcount about 25 percent over the past year. As part of the interview, Bengali shares her thoughts on what it takes to run a successful application and services company in the new services economy.
Some key highlights from the conversation:
- Streamlining consulting requires transparency: Every consulting organization has the problem of underrun or overrun projects, says Bengali, and most are familiar with the concept of sales reps packaging consulting hours to help close deals. But if you can’t track those offers, then you have no way of making it transparent and preventing abuse of the system.
- Data can bring the business to life: MicroStrategy is pulling all its data—from billing and finance to service and delivery—into a single source, and creating dashboards from that data. The result? Meaningful data for project managers, service delivery managers, and other individuals to get a more a complete view of the customer. The company went one step further, according to Bengali, and installed monitors throughout the office to display the data so that anyone can flag anything at any time.
- How Certinia has helped MicroStrategy: As a perfect example of the new services economy, MicroStrategy uses Certinia Professional Services Automation (PSA) for not just its consultants but also its education and internal IT teams as well. Overall, Certinia has helped the company better manage consulting projects as well as bring transparency across the internal organization.
Watch the full interview here, and stay tuned for more videos in the series!
