Data analytics solutions, with the power of data-driven insights, are helping many utilities to work more strategically this year. Using data analytics, your utility can take advantage of the increasing availability of data to track key performance metrics and deliver analytical reporting that facilitates proactive planning and better-informed decisions.

Here are several ways that data analytics solutions can help your utility enhance efficiency and reduce expenses. We have identified three of these ways below.

1. Improved Maintenance Management

Data analytics solutions can enable your utility to optimize maintenance and repair of such assets as power plants, transmission lines, and substations. By analyzing data on asset performance, you can identify potential issues before they become major problems, helping to reduce costly downtime and machine maintenance. Understanding the health of assets and predicting when they are likely to fail enables a utility to schedule maintenance and repairs before equipment goes offline, reducing both maintenance costs and outages.

2. Improved Grid Reliability

Data analytics solutions can aid electric utilities in improving grid reliability by helping identify potential vulnerabilities and providing insights that can drive measures to prevent outages. A solution that focuses on the analysis of grid performance data can help you identify trends and patterns that could lead to an outage, such as shifting customer load demand, extreme weather events, or equipment failure.

3. Effective Theft Detection

Energy theft typically occurs through a line tapped into a distribution cable. It represents a loss of revenue, so utilities seek to do all they can to prevent it. Utilities can leverage data analytics solutions to monitor smart grid data to identify suspicious behavior in electricity flow and to react quickly to such activity.

At Synch-Solutions, our expert consultants have deep experience in the utilities industry and can help you leverage industry best practices, tools, and strategies. Our data analytics solutions can play a significant part in ensuring efficient and reliable service to your customers. As utilities continue to evolve and adopt new technologies, data analytics will play an increasingly important role in driving business success.

The Synch-Solutions team can help your utility address the massive changes being brought about by the current environment through data analytics solutions to improve decision-making and maintain service levels.

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Data analytics solutions can help government agencies make informed decisions for such business areas as resource allocation, service improvement, and enhancement of operations and back-office tasks. In addition, they can help public sector entities identify trends and patterns, personalize citizen services, and improve responsiveness and accountability.

Here are some ways in which data analytics solutions can help government agencies better serve their stakeholders:

Identify Trends & Patterns

One way that data analytics can improve your customer service is through the identification of trends and patterns in citizen behavior. By analyzing data on the types of queries received at your government agency, it is possible to identify common issues and concerns. Data analytics can aid you in recognizing the root causes of complaints and enable you to develop strategies for addressing them and, in some cases, preventing future occurrences.

Data analytics can enable you to identify service inefficiencies that impact the citizen experience. They provide information that can direct your agency’s efforts to elevate business value by streamlining processes to improve services.

Personalize & Target Communications

Another way that data analytics solutions can improve customer service in the public sector is by enabling personalized and targeted communications. Data on the preferences and needs of individual citizens can help you can create targeted messages and resources that are more likely to be relevant and useful. For example, if your data shows that a certain group of citizens are interested in a particular service, your agency can create marketing campaigns and resources targeting that audience.

Improve Responsiveness & Accountability

Further, data analytics solutions can help improve the responsiveness and accountability of government agencies. By analyzing such data as response times to customer queries and complaints, your agency can identify areas for performance improvement and develop strategies to shorten response times.

Data analytics solutions have the potential to significantly impact customer service in the public sector. By collecting and analyzing data on your agency’s interactions with citizens, you can gain valuable insights into their needs and preferences, which can enable you to improve the citizen experience in many ways.

Your government agency can use data analytics solutions to improve the quality and efficiency of services offered at every touchpoint. This can help to increase customer satisfaction, and to build trust and confidence in your agency.

Many government agencies are adopting data analytics solutions to identify trends and patterns in citizen behavior and to develop targeted and personalized communications. As these solutions play a key role in improving customer service in the public sector, it’s vital that your agency take advantage of them to fully leverage the available data to better serve citizens and optimize agency resources.

If your agency is considering using data analytics solutions to optimize processes and citizen outcomes, the Synch-Solutions team would love to hear from you!

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But being able to accurately make that assessment hinges on an understanding of who falls into that category as a stakeholder. The obvious – and most common – answer is “employees.” Fair enough. But understanding the impact of a change often requires more specificity. Are we talking about employees across the entire organization, or just in one division or business unit? Employees in a certain role or function? Union employees? Management employees? Employees in a specific location or locations?

Accurately understanding and accounting for the impact of a change often requires a matrixed approach to documenting how it will affect multiple employee demographics.

For example, something as simple as the implementation of a new software program will certainly affect the employees who will be expected to use it daily to do their jobs. It may also affect a larger group of employees who use data generated by the new program, executives who will be expected to make decisions with that data, and administrators who will be charged with maintaining the program.

A change may also impact parties that are external to the organization but still have an interest in its performance. In this way, such groups as suppliers, customers, investors, and regulators can also be considered stakeholders.

Any comprehensive stakeholder assessment needs to cast a wide net and consider the impact of a change on any and every group that could have an interest and be affected by it. Any group that can affect the adoption and ultimate success of a change process needs to be recognized in the change plan.

The post Organizational Change Management – What is a Stakeholder? first appeared on Synch-Solutions.

Advanced data analytics solutions can transform your operations through benchmarking of student and faculty progress. Informed by benchmarking data, institutional leadership can adjust business strategies to positively impact student and staff retention, the ability to address student needs, and overall productivity within the institution.

Data analytics solutions may drive changes in workplace culture and in some business processes. But it has many proven benefits that can produce a positive impact on your educational institution and increase business value.

Here are some ways data analytics solutions are transforming higher education to optimize operations and drive value:

Optimizes Financial Spending

Nearly three-quarters of higher education institutions faced financial challenges in 2021, and colleges and universities are seeking ways to do more with fewer resources. By leveraging technology and data analytics, your organization can improve student outcomes and help achieve business goals.

Ultimately, data analytics solutions can enable your institution understand its business needs, define use cases, and develop architecture to support your long-term goals and objectives.

Improves Data Governance

It’s no secret that data is sensitive in the higher education sector, as students provide personal information as a part of enrollment. Data analytics solutions can help you foster a protected culture of data-driven decisions, allowing student information to be used securely to leverage insights for growth and optimize efficiency.

process of managing the availability, usability, integrity and security of the data in enterprise

Specialized data analytics solutions can use algorithms to monitor data quality across institutional systems. This ability can help higher education institutions ensure that the information being delivered to stakeholders is accurate, trustworthy, and useful to them.

Aligns Leadership Teams

Data analytics solutions provide insights into operations that enable your leadership teams to focus on the right operational issues.

For example, your institution can use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on retention, student learning outcomes, and recruitment to define strategic goals and establish business priorities. Data analytics solutions can also help your institution effectively drive success across finance, human resources, procurement, and daily processes by leveraging important information and real-time insights.

Accelerates Data Processes

Data analytics solutions provide flexibility and support to future reporting, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Using AI to deep dive into data analytics helps uncover information to better support students facing educational, financial, job placement, and other challenges. It also helps optimize resource use, including both personnel and equipment.

If you’re using a legacy solution, data analytics can be useful in addressing specific requirements. One common issue that arises with legacy systems is siloed data, which can hinder effective analysis. Data analytics solutions can easily consolidate data and transfer the relevant information to decision-makers, and can also optimize reporting processes and quality.

Improves Student Outcomes

Data analytics solutions can accelerate your digital transformation and become one of the most valuable tools for improving student and stakeholder outcomes.

By employing data analytics solutions, your higher education institution can effectively elevate student enrollment, retention, and graduation rates, and future-proof the success of these efforts with data-informed solutions. Your institution can leverage data analytics solutions to access predictive and prescriptive analytics to overcome daily challenges and improve student outcomes.

Data analytics solutions can transform the way you work and bring new ways to engage current and prospective students, increase enrollments, and benchmark faculty productivity.

At Synch-Solutions, our expert team can help your educational institution leverage your data and provide predictive analytics for reporting, strategic planning, and decision-making. If you would like to learn more about how our data analytics solutions can benefit your institution, contact us today.

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This is the second stage in our change journey where another ‘R’ – Resistance – typically manifests itself. We initially plan to address resistance at the Desire stage of ADKAR, when employees and other stakeholders faced with significant change first tend to dig in their heels.

Even if you’ve done a thorough job of guiding employees through the journey and addressing their needs at every stage, you still need to plan for resistance to crop back up over time. Thus, you need to reinforce the change to sustain the results you expect over the long-term.

It may be tempting to declare the process over, but for organizations going through change, this is still a precarious stage. If employees are not fully committed to see it through, they often drift back into old ways of doing things, putting new business processes at risk. Utilization and adoption stall or may even shrink. If this happens frequently enough, organizations fall into a pattern of poorly managing change, and employees learn that by keeping their heads down long enough, they can ride out change and outlast change.

What are the keys to reinforcing change?

• Moving quickly to help employees quickly implement skills learned during the Ability stage into their daily routines, so that they become second nature before any lingering resistance can take hold
• Connecting the change to broader organizational culture, so that employees aren’t left to move ahead on their own, but rather feel supported by the environment around them
• Rewarding demonstrated competence and commitment that pushes the organization in the right direction
• Continuing to tap into change sponsors as a source of coaching and modeling behaviors that will support the change and address pockets of resistance among their own stakeholders

These should not be treated as an afterthought. Reinforcement activities must be integrated into the overall change management plan so that they flow quickly and naturally as the change unfolds. Any hesitation in reinforcing the change leaves room for doubt and inertia to take hold. For an organization navigating major change, that spells doom.

The post Concluding the Organizational Change Management Journey – Reinforcement first appeared on Synch-Solutions.

Future-forward utilities and government entities are investing in their teams and technology to set themselves up for both short-term and long-term success. When these organizations leverage value-added resourcing as a part of their business strategy, strong results will follow.

Utilities and government organizations commonly use value-added resourcing to contract with IT consultants in order to address talent gaps and deliver unique skills for project-based work. Often, it does not make sense for such organizations to hire staff to fulfill all the requirements of a project team, even when a project may be expected to take several years. In such cases, value-added resourcing is the perfect solution, as it can provide experienced team members with the right skillsets for projects of any duration. As an added bonus, such resources can enable the appropriate knowledge transfer at project’s end, enhancing the capabilities of the permanent staff and driving efficient operations going forward.

Here are three key ways value-added resourcing is helping utilities and government entities elevate business value.

1. Competitive Pricing

Several elements must be considered when pricing services and recommending project budgets. Organizations can leverage value-added resourcing to build a flexible pricing structure that can result in lower resource costs than maintaining in-house resources possessing specialized skills. Bringing on IT consultants through value-added resourcing can help organizations capitalize on business value by investing in the best pricing and budget options.

2. Industry & Technology Expertise

For many utilities and government organizations, business worth is highly dependent on the technical and industry knowledge of their team. Adopting cutting-edge technological expertise relevant to your specific industry adds value for customers, employees, and other stakeholders. This can be achieved with the help of IT consultants brought on through value-added resourcing.

Additionally, obtaining expertise in particular fields can increase your organization’s ability to offer proficient knowledge on domain-relevant inquiries. Bringing the right IT consultants on board can expand your organization’s domain expertise to help enhance decision-making and assist in problem-solving.

3. Positive short- and long-term business impact

Value-added resourcing can deliver both short- and long-term advantages to utilities and government entities. Value-added resourcing is a beneficial investment for these organizations to empower their IT teams and systems, helping to address industry and company-wide challenges such as talent gaps, resource costs, and industry and domain expertise.

Through value-added resourcing, expertise can be obtained for efforts of any duration. For short-term efforts, organizations gain by bringing on expert IT consultants who can be immediately productive via value-added resourcing rather than employing a lengthy and costly internal process to hire personnel who will be needed only briefly. Whether IT consultants are used for a short- or long-term engagement, the knowledge transfer that occurs at the end of the engagement can deliver a lasting effect for the organization.

Utilities and government entities often form long-term relationships with providers of value-added resourcing with which they are comfortable. Such relationships give the organizations a trusted source for quality skilled resources, while giving the provider a valued, and often steady, customer.

Whether your organization is planning to invest in value-added resourcing this month or next year, it’s important to understand how this service offering can improve business value for your organization. At Synch-Solutions, our team of IT consultants average at least eight years of experience in their respective fields of expertise delivering value-added resourcing. To learn how our team can immediately impact your utility or government organization, contact us.

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Gartner predicts that by 2026, government entities that develop purpose-driven AI are over 80% more likely to have their AI innovations succeed than those who don’t. This level of success is expected because data analytics capabilities are developing a strong track record for rapidly streamlining government processes and providing fact-based information for enhanced decision-making.

As we have recognized in recent years in our data-driven world, greater and greater quantities of data are becoming available, and having the ability to distill such a vast array of data down to accurate information is critical in the public sector.

A variety of data analytics trends will continue to impact the public sector. These must be addressed and prioritized to drive productivity, effectiveness, information security, and citizen-centric services.

Here are some top data analytics trends that are set to skyrocket in 2023:

Data-Centric AI

Gartner predicts that by 2025, AI data models will replace 60% of existing centralized data architectures. But not all such models are the same. Does your government entity review AI-specific data management problems, such as bias in coded algorithms? Bias in algorithms can have a major impact on underrepresented communities. Organizations can help address this and other issues by adopting data-centric AI,  which incorporates machine learning and other techniques that enable the AI to learn from the data rather than relying on algorithms. Data-centric AI also drives improved data-collection and labelling methods. Data-centric AI is becoming a component of the data management strategies of many government organizations.

Context-Enriched Analytics

Another major trend is the use of context-enriched analytics to optimize the relationship between data points and deep analysis. Such analytics take into account the medium users are employing to interact with the content, such as a Web browser, a mobile phone, or a tablet. Context-enriched analytics can be embedded in business applications to better correlate analytics reporting to the context of the business need. By embracing context-enriched analytics, government entities can gain a deeper understanding of user behavior, and thus be able to improve, and often customize, the citizen experience.

Challenges with Data Literacy

Another data analytics trend we anticipate in 2023 in the public sector is a continuing shortfall in data skills and literacy, primarily due to heightened competition for talent and an increase in virtual workplaces. It will be important for government entities to hire and retain resources with the ability to read, write, and communicate data within the organization to properly leverage data analytics to support the business strategy. Due to the increasing cost of, and competition for, quality data-literate personnel, it will likely become more and more difficult for government entities to maintain the data literacy necessary to meet their business goals.

Increased Data Sharing

Data sharing has always been a critical aspect of data analytics. We expect to see increased capabilities across enterprises to share data at scale with safety and security measures in place. Increased access to large volumes of data will enable deeper and more refined data analysis. By improving data sharing within and across departments and agencies, government entities can enhance collaboration, uncover new insights, and better align data to specific tasks.

Effective Governance

Another trend we anticipate in the coming years is the use of data analytics solutions to enhance business governance for the public sector. The solutions that will be most effective are those that orient their data and analytics governance practices around the business rather than just the data. By prioritizing business outcomes and identifying clear business metrics to define success, organizations can focus on the data analytics that help them better achieve those desired outcomes. Also, by establishing governance of data and analytics across functions, departments, and agencies, governments can improve the quality, consistency, and completeness of their data, which will help paint an accurate picture of the health of the organization and its effectiveness in serving the public.

Data analytics solutions will continue to advance in the upcoming years, bringing improved governance, data sharing, context-enriched analytics, and data-centric AI capabilities. Data analytics solutions will continue be leveraged to deliver timely information to enhance decision-making and drive enterprise-wide improvements.

At Synch-Solutions, our expert team can help your government entity better leverage your data and provide predictive analytics for reporting, strategic planning, and decision-making. If you would like to learn more about how our data analytics solutions can benefit your government entity, contact us today.

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Your workforce may be fully informed about and committed to a particular change. But without the ability to follow through, their ultimate adoption isn’t a certainty. They may be “willing” to execute on that commitment. But you need to ensure that they are “able.” This isn’t a trivial exercise. If stakeholders aren’t provided with the ability to support a change, they will abandon It quickly.

So what do we mean when we reference “ability?” It means any type of support that is going to give your workforce the wherewithal to follow through on their commitment to push through a specific change. It might mean training. It might mean tools. It might mean an ongoing flow of information that provides necessary context.

This stage in the journey requires an understanding of your workforce and other stakeholders and what they will need to make the change a reality. It starts with a thorough skills assessment to gauge where your stakeholders are vs. where they will need to be.

• What skills do they currently possess?
• What skills will they need to adopt the change?
• Where – and how wide – are the gaps?
• What is needed to bridge them? With which audiences?
• When will they need these skills?
• How can we impart these skills?

Answering these questions with specifics provides the basis for a training/skill-building plan intended to drive the appropriate training and tools to the right audiences at the optimal time in the change process. Depending on the breadth and complexity of the change, this type of assessment may need to be done across multiple groups of employees or other stakeholders, with variations to be expected group by group, and a training plan that matches the varied requirements and appropriate timeframes.

The post Willing Isn’t Enough; Able Drives Adoption first appeared on Synch-Solutions.

Every department of every college and university has the need to perform high-volume processes, repetitive tasks, digital processes, tasks with multiple steps, and tasks that require multiple systems or interfaces. Some of the common areas that RPA can support include Admissions, Audit/Finance, Human Resources, Procurement, Academics, Student Services, Athletics, and Information Technology.

The implementation of RPA provides numerous benefits to higher education institutions, including improved student and staff experience, error reduction, more efficient use of labor hours, cost savings, improved job quality for faculty and staff, and streamlined communication with students and alumni.

RPA in the Back Office

Automating back-office functions frees up an institution’s staff to focus on high-value tasks that require critical decision-making. Exceptional opportunities for RPA to support back-office functions of colleges and universities include:

• Invoicing and reconciliation
• Payroll management
• Expense reporting
• Leave and travel approval
• Financial reporting (monthly and end-of-year)
• Credit card reconciliation
• Auditing and SOX compliance
• Vendor management

RPA for Student-Facing Interactions

RPA is not just for back-office functions; the use of RPA for student-facing interactions is growing. Colleges and universities are applying RPA to such student-facing operations as:

• Course scheduling and add/drop
• Scholarship management
• Financial aid management
• Research support
• Student Services
• Career Services
• Course/exam scheduling
• Student communications
• Reconciliation of student coursework with graduation requirements
• Assignment grading
• Attendance management
• Equipment and room reservation
• Transcript processing
• Query response
• Healthcare and counseling management
• Admission processing

RPA for IT Support

The Information Technology departments of higher education institutions offer unique challenges due to the need for processes to execute over multiple platforms using a variety of technologies, along with the need to manage a vast range of physical and virtual resources. In addition, IT departments often use a wide variety of tools from multiple vendors, and frequently, data cannot be exchanged between them very easily. RPA can bridge the gap between these tools and legacy systems. Some of the specialized IT functions bots can support at colleges and universities include:

• Managing support tickets
• Maintaining/upgrading and testing applications
• Simplifying cloud migrations
• Handling common security alerts
• Managing access

Bots can perform these functions quickly and efficiently, freeing up IT staff hours for value-add activities.

Implementing RPA at a higher education institution can drive cost savings ranging from about 25 to 60 percent, in addition to providing other benefits. At a time when colleges and universities  are seeing a slowdown in enrollment and a tightening of donations, implementing RPA helps lower costs for both institutions and their stakeholders.

Is your higher education institution ripe for automation? Contact Synch-Solutions today to get started on your automation journey!

The post Robotic Process Automation: Applications for Higher Education first appeared on Synch-Solutions.

Changes in the business landscape are providing organizations with opportunities to develop new capabilities in leveraging data to help achieve business goals. Data Analytics provide data-driven insights that can enhance business outcomes. So what exactly is Data Analytics? Let’s find out below.

What is Data Analytics?

Data Analytics is the science of discovering and interpreting the meaning behind the data that helps managers gain insights to use for decision-making. Ultimately, Data Analytics solutions enable organizations to examine large amounts of data and uncover valuable patterns, correlations, and insights.

It’s found that of companies worldwide use data analytics to drive processes and cost efficiency, which indicates that businesses consider Data Analytics solutions to be a necessary technology solution to draw conclusions from data and make better predictions.

Often, we are unable to pick up on granular trends that IT technology solutions such as Data Analytics can help us identify. Data Analytics solutions harness data to help organizations identify new opportunities and, in turn, enhance operational efficiency and financial performance. Here’s how Data Analytics solutions can help you gain significant business value:

Enhanced Decision-Making 

The success of a business is governed by decision-making. Making the right decision is often challenging for managers and staff members, as it bears significant weight that can have widespread impacts on the business.

A Data Analytics solution will help you organize masses of data, pull out the information that will provide the greatest value, and deliver it to you in a format tailored to your needs, to enable faster, better-informed business decisions. Data Analytics solutions can provide insights into where your business has been, where it can go, and what you can do to get there. They can also incorporate into the analysis external factors that impact your business, helping to direct your decision-making by leveraging data from such external sources as mobile, social, and public data.

Standardized and Flexible Reporting

Data Analytics reporting falls into two basic categories – “canned” reports and ad hoc reports.

A canned report is one that covers a particular topic, has already been developed, and is in routine use – typically being run on a regular schedule, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Such reports can enable you to track performance metrics in such areas as operations, customer service, and sales.

Ad hoc reports are not run on a schedule. A manager or other user will create such a report on an as-needed basis to address a specific business question or issue. For example, they may want to explore an unexpected change in a trend identified in the KPIs tracked through a canned report. Ad hoc reporting tools enable users to drill down to a greater level of detail within the selected data source. Users without extensive technical skills are able to create their own queries through simple functionality such as pick lists and drag-and-drop, and to display the output in a variety of different formats, such as charts, grids, and graphs.

In addition to enabling in-depth analysis, Data Analytics reporting helps make better use of staff time by empowering users with a minimum of technical expertise to automatically receive reports regularly or to create in-depth, self-serve analytical reports to aid in decision-making.

Data Translated Into Visuals

Reviewing and analyzing data can be overwhelming, especially for those who do not classify this as one of their strengths. With everyone interpreting data differently, managers need implement standardized solutions to ensure that the appropriate data are accessible to the users who need them, in an understandable and usable format.

Translating data into visuals – such as graphs, maps, and tables – better enables your team members to uncover valuable patterns, correlations, and insights.

Gain A Competitive Advantage

Data Analytics solutions help managers discover opportunities to optimize overall business performance and improve the bottom line. These technology solutions provide access to accurate, current analytics that communicate meaningful insights that can help your organization remain competitive within a rapidly changing business environment.

Additionally, Data Analytics solutions can help you leverage historical data from prior projects to forecast level of effort and costing for new projects with greater accuracy, efficiency, and confidence, enabling better-informed decisions around proposed projects.

With data playing a crucial role in decision-making and project predictability, businesses must have access to accurate data that can be delivered in a useful form to decision-makers and other end users. Data Analytics ensures that all information is organized in a way that it can be fully leveraged to complement mission-critical business decisions.

If you’re looking to employ Data Analytics solutions or other technology solutions to expedite reporting and enhance business efficiency, contact our friendly team today to learn more.

The post What is Data Analytics and why does it matter? first appeared on Synch-Solutions.