Whitepaper | Empowering Your Team: A Guide to Successfully Rolling Out Microsoft Copilot Part One: Piloting Copilot

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As AI comes to dominate the world of technology, generative AI tools are becoming the key to staying competitive and efficient.

Enter Microsoft Copilot, an AI-powered assistant integrated with Microsoft 365. By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent suggestions, Copilot has the potential to revolutionise your team’s productivity and streamline your workflows.

However, a successful implementation takes more than purchasing licences and adding desktop shortcuts. A well-planned and structured rollout of Microsoft Copilot will ensure that your organisation reaps maximum benefits from this world-changing tool, while minimising disruption and wasted resources.

This guide outlines the essential steps for businesses to successfully implement and maximise the benefits of Copilot

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Email: sales@advance.net.au

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Whitepaper | Your Employees Are Probably Using ChatGPT – Are You Ready for the Risks?

The past two years have seen the meteoric rise of a technology that many experts hail as world-changing: generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI chatbots like ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, have become a nearly ubiquitous tool for individuals and businesses across many sectors. In fact, one in 10 Australians now report using ChatGPT for work 1 —regardless of their workplace’s official stance on AI usage.

To use ChatGPT effectively and safely at work, employees must be educated about its features, risks, and limitations. Key training topics are covered in our free whitepaper below!

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Supercharging CX with Customer Journey Management

Source: inQuba

The Value of Optimised Customer Experiences

It's difficult to argue that positive customer experiences don't provide benefits to both customers and business. When customers have a seamless, rewarding experience, the result is greater loyalty, improved customer retention and customer lifetime value (which invariably means greater customer spend). Having worked with businesses in a variety of industry verticals, it has always been exciting to demonstrate these principles when correlating CX scores with operational metrics, such as revenue or profit. And in reality, the points generally hold true.

Better customer experience also translates to lower operational cost to service the customer - this can be via lower complaints or through more efficient handling of customer queries/issues.

And because experiences are more difficult to replicate, than say a product feature, they can also be the ultimate competitive differentiator..

Source: inQuba

Where Traditional CX Falls Short

There is a "but" however. Simply measuring customer feedback, obtaining scores for your key metrics, and even correlating these with business outcomes, is no longer enough in today's hyper-connected world where an omni-channel approach to the customer journey is mandated.

I'm often reminded of my grandmother's ISP, who only offers support via a single channel, which isn't easily accessible for many people like her. But efficiently delivering a well-orchestrated omni-channel customer journey isn’t all that easy. Which begs the question; is it valuable to know that CX metrics for a given channel are on-target, if the customer is traversing many other channels to reach their goal? Or how do we know where the customer is dropping off and which journey path is actually the best for that individual customer?

And how does one bring together all experiences, touchpoints, and channels along the customer journey to ascertain (with a strong degree of confidence) where the pitfalls and opportunities are... all in real-time so that the customer can be engaged appropriately?

Add to this that often it is difficult to demonstrate tangible business value from traditional CX programs, within a reasonable lead time to ROI. Business leaders aren't merely interested in a CX-metric uplift; they want to understand what improvements mean in terms of increased acquisition, retention, and upsell revenue.

The need is for a better understanding of causality and improved control over customer outcomes along the journey i.e. Customer Journey Orchestration or better Customer Journey Management.

Customer Journey Orchestration

What really excites me about Customer Journey Management/Orchestration is that it provides a mechanism to help customers reach their goals, all while making it easier to demonstrate tangible business results to leadership. It all starts with a clearly-defined goal, followed by a mapping of the key journey points that customers traverse towards that goal (which are often done via customer Job To Be Done and Journey Mapping Workshops).

Like any CX or Customer Journey Management methodology, good data is the cornerstone of a successful program. However, where many methodologies and technologies miss out is the customer's context - there's a reason they say that "Context is King".

But context needs to extend beyond behavioural context (i.e. what the customer has done or what they are likely to do). It must include the customer's emotional context (what they think/feel), and this often requires a "conversation" or dialogue with the customer.

A good example of this was with an insurer's onboarding journey, where we were able to ask customers what they wanted to achieve in retirement. This simple additional emotional context allowed us to better understand the customers' context and thereby personalise the customer's journey accordingly. It facilitated personalised customer nudges along the onboarding journey, and the results spoke for themselves; with the test group cohort outperforming the control group by 34%.

Example Customer Journey: Acquisition Journey (source: inQuba)

Finally, Customer Journey Orchestration needs to extend beyond a single channel. Where customers need or want to switch channels, the methodology should allow them to do so. Think about my grandmother with her ISP. Alternatively, think of a customer that is going through the Application Journey and hits a snag when completing online forms. Typically, this customer might drop off if the effort is too high, but by managing the customer journey we can identify when the customer has gone idle and nudge them, perhaps by offering support via a different channel such as the call centre. There might be other points along the journey where the customer goes idle, and where different nudges/engagements would be appropriate, but the compounding effect of these incremental, contextual nudges adds immensely to the final result - customers reaching the goal.

Journey Summaries, including Journey Duration, Status, and Sentiment Overview (Source: inQuba)

Demonstrating Value

To my earlier point, business leaders need to demonstrate causality in order to prove the value of initiatives. Customer Journey Orchestration is no different, which is why an experimental design is best when first testing your program's impact. Experimentation in business is nothing new, with Harvard Business review writing about it back in 2014 already.

To ensure that you can more easily demonstrate the value of your journey programs, I find that it is best to consider the following design principles:

• Start small by selecting a customer journey (what others might often call a "micro journey") that has high business impact

• Embed test and control groups in the program design, at least until you've proven that your approach adds value

• Embrace Outside-In input by leveraging the expertise of people outside your domain to help uncover blind spots in your Customer Journeys and Engagements

• Be bold; to innovate by definition means to do something different. Many of our customers have realised immense value by trying new digital channels and nudges/engagements to help customers along their journeys

Getting Started

Customer Journey Management and Orchestration is as much a methodology as it is a technology-based approach. That is why we recommend starting with Journey Workshops, where we identify customer journey points, drop-offs, goal(s), as well as opportunities to engage and nudge the customer.

If you're as excited about Journey Management and Orchestration as I am, look out for one of our webinars or round-tables. Or, get in touch for a coffee & chat.

Hook, Line, and Sinker Building Phishing Resilience in Australian Businesses - Whitepaper

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The threat of phishing cannot be underestimated—nor can it be entirely eliminated. However, with diligent attention to education, preparation, and response, Australian businesses can build a resilient defence that significantly reduces the risk and potential impact of phishing attacks.

We’ve created this whitepaper to help raise awareness so you and your business can avoid being compromised.

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Use Case | Australian Healthcare Provider Maximises Efficiency and Success Through Data Integration, Business Intelligence and Modern Reporting

Business owners, CEOs, managers, and employees all face decisions daily that impact the success of our organisations and individual roles. It is crucial to use data to make the best decisions and focus energy on getting the best return on time investment. We have lots of data, that is a certainty!

One of our clients in the healthcare sector had a significant problem with data integration and effective reporting. While providing medical devices for patients, they were unable to make data-driven decisions due to lagging and inaccurate reporting. This impacted their appointing setting across the entire business and across various locations in Australia.

Reporting challenges faced were:

• A lack of insight into the business, proving difficult to make good decisions on staffing and resource planning.

• Difficulty determining which clinics were busy and the number of reserved appointments/placeholders available within the calendars.

• Inconsistency across the retail brands.

• Different diary management systems and appointment definitions.

• Operational data entry issues.

The business needed to run more efficiently, and management had to make effective decisions.

To address these challenges, we used a Business Intelligence tool (PowerBI, Qlik, and Tableau are popular examples) to create a holistic view of business performance and leveraged the data warehouse for the brands.

Data integration and Business Intelligence tools allowed us to:

• Create reports according to exact Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

• Create a mapping table for appointment types and a traffic light "dashboard" for quick identification of low/high-performing areas, with a drill-down function for further investigation.

• We can now examine the percentage of booked/busy areas by business unit, state, clinic, and medical practitioner to make changes in real time.

• Determine the number of reserved "test" appointments available.

• Check for free space within the calendars.

• Enable reconciliation and check for any data entry errors.

Using this approach provided the following business and efficiency benefits:

• A holistic view of the business.

• Management can make informed decisions on where to deploy resources. Call centre staff can be tasked with booking appointments for clinics with a high vacancy rate or moving appointments forward if needed.

• Connecting various data sources highlighted the inconsistent format/terminology used across different clinics, which was then improved.

• Reduction in errors due to manual data entry.

You may already have access to Microsoft PowerBI or have used it before, but are you getting the business benefits discussed above? We work on new projects to make clients more efficient and effective with better data integration, reporting, and insights.

Phone: 08 8238 6500

Email: sales@advance.net.au

Website: www.advance.net.au

DATA: Data Debt - A Silent Challenge in Data Engineering

In the realm of data engineering, the spotlight often falls on technological innovation and how to manage burgeoning datasets efficiently. Yet, a critical but less discussed aspect is 'data debt.'

What is Data Debt?

Data debt arises when shortcuts in data handling, such as collection, storage, and management, are taken. Driven by the urgency to produce results, compromises like embedding transformations directly into SQL, instead of utilising variables, are made. Although this might offer immediate time savings, it can lead to poorly structured datasets and overlooked documentation, causing long-term complications.

Real-World Impact

The repercussions of data debt are significant and widespread. While no one intentionally codes a server’s IP address only to change the production server pre-weekend with a Monday board meeting looming, such scenarios are not unheard of. This often results in teams spending excessive time deciphering value calculations and dependent data sources, causing project delays and data inaccuracies.

Strategies to Mitigate Data Debt

Documentation: While documenting data sources, transformations, and assumptions can seem burdensome, it's invaluable for managing complexity. Balancing the speed of development with adequate documentation is key. Encouraging new hires to contribute to documentation and code improvement can also be effective. This not only ensures the upkeep of your data processes but also fosters a learning environment.

Data Governance: Implementing a solid data governance framework is essential. This involves establishing clear policies and procedures for data management to minimise inconsistencies and inefficiencies, ultimately reducing data debt.

Regular Audits: Conducting regular audits is crucial. Surprisingly, some ETL/ELT processes yield inconsistent results upon repetition. Regular audits help identify data quality issues, code alterations, and state-dependent calculations, ensuring reliability and consistency in data processing.

Looking Ahead
As Joel Spolsky aptly put it, "code doesn't rust," but in our interconnected world, even code can 'rust.' Adapting swiftly is crucial, yet challenging when burdened with significant data debt.

One lingering question remains: Is managing data debt a technical challenge or a strategic business issue that requires proper budgeting and management?

Have you encountered similar challenges? How does your organisation address data debt?

Use Case | Unlocking Efficiency: Data Integration Transforms Travel and Accommodation Business

Data is the lifeblood of success, but it's also overwhelming, and people often ask us where to start with a data project. Usually, it's the place that is causing significant pain.

In the example below, we discussed the existing process and the challenges this causes and applied a process and software to automate and simplify the process.

Invoice/File Processing

Challenges

1. Invoice Overload

Travel and accommodation businesses deal with a high volume of invoices daily. Manually processing and approving these invoices can be overwhelming, leading to delays, errors, and inefficiencies.

2. Visibility Gap

Without real-time visibility into invoice commitments, businesses often find themselves in the dark until month-end or the next reporting cycle. This lack of transparency hampers decision-making and financial planning.

3. Manual Data Entry Woes

The tedious task of manually entering invoice details consumes valuable time and resources. Errors are common, and the process is prone to bottlenecks.

Solutions

1. Streamlined Approval Process

We’ve transformed the way invoices are handled. By implementing an automated scanning and approval process, we enabled swift and accurate invoice management. Say goodbye to paperwork overload!

2. Web-Based Portal

Our user-friendly web portal empowers clients to track invoices in real-time. From submission to approval status, everything is at their fingertips. No more waiting for month-end reports!

3. Budget Alerts

Our system proactively alerts departments and projects when invoices threaten to exceed budgets. Timely notifications prevent financial surprises and allow for course corrections.

Benefits

1. Workload Reduction

Significantly reduce manual effort. Staff can focus on strategic tasks, knowing that routine processes are automated.

2. Informed Decision-Making

Real-time visibility enables better decisions. Businesses can allocate resources wisely, optimise spending, and stay ahead of financial commitments.

Data and system integration is not just about solving problems. This type of work empowers businesses to thrive. Efficiency, transparency, and informed decision-making are the cornerstones of our success.

Interested in transforming your business? Reach out to us today below.

Email: sales@advance.net.au

Phone: +61 8 8238 6500

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Cybersecurity Myths Debunked - Whitepaper

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Cybersecurity is no longer a new topic for most organisations.

Digital transformation creates incredible opportunities in almost all industries, but it brings with it unique and modern challenges. While those challenges are generally understood, several myths still surround them. In this whitepaper, we take a look at some of the common ones and check the facts.

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Data Security - ASD Cyber Threat Report 2024

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Every business needs to protect its data. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) releases a Cyber Threat Report every year that covers the state of cybersecurity, cybercrime, and cyber resilience in Australia. In this whitepaper, we summarise and analyse the most important findings that are essential to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

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Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan

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A CIRP empowers business leaders to take a proactive, predictable approach to cybersecurity incident management—rather than waiting for an incident to occur and trying to determine how to respond under intense pressure.

In this whitepaper, we’ll delve into the essential components of a CIRP and how to create one that suits your organisation’s specific needs.

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Cybersecurity: What is a cyber-aware culture, why it’s important, and how to create one.

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Employees can be a business’s greatest cybersecurity asset or its biggest vulnerability. As modern businesses place greater emphasis on technical cybersecurity defences and controls, cyber attackers are increasingly focusing on the ‘human factor’ by targeting employees.

It’s often said that a business is only as secure as its least informed employee. No matter how much a business has invested in cybersecurity, the unfortunate truth is that it can all be undone in seconds by a single employee who lacks a basic understanding of cybersecurity. This is why building a “securityaware culture” within an organisation is not just a high return on investment, but a cybersecurity necessity.

So, what is a Security-Aware Culture? Read the whitepaper to get a grasp on this important element in protecting your data, improving compliance and safeguarding intellectual property.

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Cloud Security - A Shared Responsibility | Understand the basics

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Using cloud software like Xero, MYOB, or Salesforce? Our free whitepaper provides a foundation of cloud cybersecurity considerations to ensure your data is secure.

While it would be nice to say that security in the cloud is purely the responsibility of the cloud service provider, the reality is that such an important responsibility must be shared between the cloud provider and the consumer.

However, ‘cloud’ is a broad term that describes several different technical frameworks, and the security responsibilities are shared differently in each.

This paper will cover the three most common cloud frameworks and how security responsibilities are split between the provider and the consumer.

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Essential Eight Best Practices Guide: Multifactor Authentication

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Have you ever been annoyed by those multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes that are sent to you via SMS or email when you try to log in to your online accounts? While it's true that these codes can be a bit of a hassle, they serve an incredibly important purpose - protecting your accounts from being stolen. Also, we can actually make those codes a much more seamless experience with lower friction and fewer steps to gain access to your systems.

In today's digital age, over 5 billion people are connected to the internet, and any of them are potential cybercriminals who may try to guess your username and password to gain access to your accounts.

While it's essential to use strong, unique passwords for all of your online accounts, it's not always enough to protect you from account takeovers. That's where MFA comes in. This security feature requires you to provide an additional form of verification, such as a code that is sent to your phone or email or available in an app, which is needed to log in to your account. And it's incredibly effective - MFA has been shown to block 99.99% of account takeover attempts.

Check out the whitepaper which covers MFA in more detail above.

To discuss how you can best protect your data and IP, leave your details below, and an expert will get in touch with you.

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Which Backup Media Is Right For You?

Twenty years ago, backup media was easy to get your head around. Floppy Disk, Iomega, CD and Tape Drives, nothing to it.

Nowadays there’s so much more – what method of backup to use, where the backups are stored, how the backups are taken, when they are taken and how the backups are tested to ensure they are restorable.

Floppy disks and Iomega have gone the way of the dodo, but let’s look at current backup media still in use

• USB Stick
• Internal Hard Drive (via RAID)
• External Hard Drive
• NAS
• CD / DVD (some people still use it!)
• High Speed Tape Drives
• Remote Backup Services
• Syncing over internet (OneDrive, Google Drive etc.)
• Cloud Backup

Each of these methods has its place depending on many factors, but don’t fool yourself thinking that a cheaper version will be ‘OK’ - It rarely is.

Considerations when deciding on a backup media type

Type of backup

Whether you are backing up hourly or daily and what sort of files you are backing up should help determine what backup media to use. For example, if you have a large amount of data requiring a nightly backup, then you could not use DVDs.

Backup Media Cost

It is important to factor in the cost of backup media, as well as the number of devices you require to ensure a consistent and effective backup process.

Backup data security

Identifying what is backed-up and how sensitive that data is can help you decide the most appropriate backup media. If your data is integral to your business, don’t sacrifice quality for savings.

Restorability

You need to weigh the risk of your selected media - how often will a restore fail per 1000 times it is tried? Each type of backup media has its own pros and cons and you need to investigate them properly to make an informed decision.

Hardware Redundancy

Ensuring that your hardware is not going to become redundant over time is extremely important when choosing a media type. Five years down the line, you may need to restore data which seems recent today, and the hardware may be considered obsolete with the restore devices hard to find. Restoring from a 3.5” floppy disk today would not be the easiest task.

Restore speed and time

Depending on the data, whether it is ‘mission critical’ or whether you can do without for a day or more, all plays a part on which backup media to use and what processes to put in place. Consider putting your crucial servers on a quicker restoring media where possible.

These are only a few considerations when looking at backup media. You need to see the complete picture and envision where your organisation might be in five to ten years’ time. If you think back on how things have changed since the 1990s, you can appreciate that being open to new ideas and processes could not only save you time, but also money.

For more information on back-up software and processes, get in touch with one of our highly experienced staff today. 

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Is Your Disaster Recovery Up To Date?

What should I do with my old hardware?

An all too common trend in the IT industry is to give ex-production hardware a new lease of life running the disaster recovery site. Tight budgets often restrict capital expenditure to areas where real value is visible, and the impacts and results are noticed throughout the organisation. 

These initial savings can be quickly forgotten when an unplanned incident forces the switch over to your disaster recover site. Previous testing may have been successful on the DR equipment during your routine maintenance and test restores, but when a major incident occurs, are you confident that your DR is up to the task?

These are the questions you should ask yourself:

Will the dated hardware run our complete production workload?

How big is the impact on our users?

How long can we operate utilising the DR site before losing business?

How big is the impact on our customers?

It is not unusual for companies to consider that having high-end hardware offsite, doing nothing 98% of the time to be a waste of resources…

The key is to justify the initial expense, leveraging the DR site to provide an additional return on investment. An effective strategy is to live boot a complete clone of the production environment on a separate virtual segment, presenting a fast and accurate test development system.

Utilising Veeam combined with HPE Nimble Secondary Flash Array technology and your favourite hypervisor, you achieve a fast, production ready DR solution. Accompanied with the additional benefit of a fully functional test or development system at your fingertips that can be spun up in minutes.

If you want to learn more about disaster recovery solutions, please contact the team at Advance today.