A letter to the CIO we'd like to see...

Dear CIO,

I bet you never thought this day would come…me writing with good news that my team in Finance will be submitting fewer IT requests. Go figure (pun intended).

Turns out there’s a new way for my staff to manage more of the data, processes and workflows that your team has been handling for us from the finance and BI systems. No more resources needed to manually code and manage this. We can automate most of it while working within the security and data integrity parameters that IT has in place.

Let’s discuss two action items:
- Cancel next week’s sales meeting with our ERP vendor. The allure of standardizing on one supplier is no longer appealing. We’ll save a bundle using the systems we’ve already got and sticking with a best-of-breed approach for financial data management.
- Let’s schedule a roundtable for the IT and Finance teams to strategize on the initiatives we’ve been tasked with by the CEO: Expense and Revenue Management, Performance Management and our adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Gotta run - my weekly 1-1 meeting with the CEO.

Regards,
The CFO

Profitable vs Unprofitable Decision-Making

Oracle finally gets it, at least in words. Frank Buytendijk’s blog on “Management Excellence and Oracle EPM part 1” suggests that Oracle may have tried to solve the challenge of making profitable Operational decisions by including the underlying Financial data. He further suggests that Oracle is two years ahead of their closest integration competitor. While I don’t believe the latter and have evidence as to its untruth, I do believe that Frank is focused in the right direction to suggest that a diet of pure financial data or pure operational data is drought or famine, but certainly not a balanced meal. A truly healthy business will make vital decisions that combine up-to-the-minute financial data with the operational systems data to ensure a data-enriched decision process. Decisions in a financial vacuum are anemic and life-threatening when variables such as gas prices, finance rates, currency translation and inventory levels are critical to a decision process and have a delay or periodic update cycle that is out of synch with the decision-making continuum. Multi-dimensional data still lags behind transactional data in its ability to be accessed in a time-sensitive manner due to the very systems that created the data. The power of the cube, such as delivered by Hyperion, created a one-way flow that is now antiquated in theory. The strong financial instincts of today’s CFOs and rising finance stars begs the use of this cube data downstream, co-mingled with the operational decisions of the lines of business. This is the innovation of which we speak; the ability to ask for more and initiate change to older patterns of behavior to uncover a fresh use of data, propelling the business forward into leadership.

The Inside Story of Financial Systems Innovators

In my career I’ve worked with and for many companies and I’ve met many different people, and one thing that I can say about them in general is that there are some who are true innovators in their professions. They view things with fresh ideas, they see solutions where others see only problems, they look at things that exist and instead of just accepting them as they are now, they come up with a better way of doing them. These are the unsung heroes of corporations everywhere. They are the people who are creating the future today, although in many cases nobody even notices what they do – except maybe that a web page loads a little faster, or a report has a little more useful data than it did before.

When it comes to finance systems – a subject near and dear to my professional heart – I see innovations like these all the time. Although a lot of money gets spent on the big, overarching, reengineering projects or enterprise application implementations, in many cases the return on such investments is marginal (or at least takes years to realize). It’s the simple, incremental changes that are often the most effective. Sometimes just a small shift in perception turns an existing concept on its head, and opens up a whole new vista of possibilities. Existing systems can be leveraged and improved in whole new ways perhaps by making just one significant (and often inexpensive) change. Such changes can be introduced to even large, staid organizations by just one visionary individual who sees what is possible and is willing to make it happen.

One example I can recall was a Director of Finance for a major retailer, who as part of his company’s reorganization of their financial systems architecture for Y2K introduced a small, insignificant product called Essbase into the mix. Despite some objections from his IT folks that it was not an approved standard product, and despite some technical challenges in integrating it with some of his legacy systems, he managed to make it the standard for financial reporting throughout the company. The value to his organization was immense, and the incremental cost a drop in the bucket of the overall system, and more than offset by the cost savings in consulting alone. By introducing this one, small innovation, he was able to radically alter his company’s financial systems for the better, and incidentally, became a rising star in both his company and his industry.

This blog is dedicated to those financial systems innovators – the finance system managers, enterprise architects, budget managers and others – who make those incremental changes possible, and to the innovations that they create. We will focus on telling the customer’s and end user’s story, and always anchor our posts with real-world examples. We will include both finance/business and IT/technical perspectives, as we want to help articulate both concrete value and practical implementations. Each month we‘ll select a different topic, and post different thoughts and ideas around it. If there’s a topic you’re passionate about, let us know and we’ll try to include it in future months. Also, if you’re interested in contributing (and we strongly encourage customer contributions), please contact us and let us know what you‘d like to post about. The list of upcoming topics will be constantly updated, so remember to check back often to see what’s coming up. Thanks for reading.