How To Use Technology To Overcome Today’s Top CFO Challenges

In a data-driven organization, the person with the most reliable data and the clearest view of the facts is likely to have a positive impact on desired outcomes. Strategic decisions require more than just being persuasive; credibility is established with sound data and analysis. This means that the CFO is often in the best position to exert meaningful influence on strategic decisions.

But if the CFO cannot access timely and accurate financial reports and is juggling too many competing priorities, the ability to impact outcomes and contribute to strategic decisions can be too easily compromised.

Leave a commentTech

How To Become More Productive With Decentralized Business Processes

It’s a fact that new technologies like cloud-based accounting are changing standard business and decision-making processes for many companies. The threat of a bottleneck forming in the finance department increases as an organization grows and departments need much faster financial approvals and accurate, timely information.

In a spot survey of CFOs conducted by GCE during its seminar at SSON’s 8th Annual IT Financial Management Week, participants were asked, “How would you describe the distribution of information in your organization?”

Leave a commentTech

Why Does Size Matter When It Comes To Financial Accounting Technology?

Determining what kind of financial accounting technology solution a business needs is often a matter of asking one simple question: How big is the company?

Different-size organizations have different needs. Small companies, where the owner is master chef and chief dishwasher, typically need a system that allows them to do more cooking and less washing. Medium-size organizations need a system where financial applications are integrated with operational applications and the controls that come with that. Meanwhile, large enterprises need a full scope enterprise resource management system that enables data to remain consistent between departments.

Leave a commentFinance, Tech

4 Reasons Users Might Hate Your New ERP (and What to Do About It)

For executives, project managers, and IT decision makers, going live with a new ERP is an exciting time. After all the planning and preparation, there’s often a great deal of optimism about the improvements a new ERP system has to offer. And, rightfully so. A well-deployed ERP system can help ease interdepartmental communication, improve efficiencies, turn data into actionable business intelligence, and enable a wide variety of other business benefits.

Leave a commentTech

Bringing SQL to NoSQL: Future or Fool’s Errand?

When you start talking about SQL, some people think it’s black and white. If you are NoSQL, you don’t support SQL. If you do support SQL, then you SUPPORT SQL. This means in the minds of many business stakeholders (and even some CIOs) that you can simply connect your existing business intelligence platform up to Hadoop or MongoDB or Cassandra with no hassles, issues or concerns. If you read some of the marketing materials, it is as if “It slices. It dices. It juliennes…”

Leave a commentTech

Innovating For the Numerator

The National Academy of Engineering identified fourteen “Grand Challenges for Engineering” that must be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable, economically robust, and politically stable future. (see the full list here) The challenges are a call-to-action for solutions to some of the most pressing issues in the 21st century: identifying safe and clean energy resources; providing for human health, nutrition and security; restoring and reinventing infrastructure for urban habitation; advancing computing power and capabilities; and developing new tools for teaching, learning, medicine and scientific discovery.

Leave a commentTech

Reading Emotions in a Call Center

Check out this video of Steve Jobs talking about the origins of the iPad. The text that appears as Jobs talks is how a computer program developed by a firm called Beyond Verbal is interpreting Jobs’ emotion. That is, the program is judging whether Jobs is feeling fatigue or nostalgia based not on what is…

Leave a commentTech

IT Security and Engaging Users to Reduce Vulnerability

There is a lot of discussion going on about security in the cloud. With numerous advancements in technologies of various sorts intended to secure our information and identities on the Web, how is it that security continues to be a growing problem? The answer is in the Big Data the Web collects (read about the Internet of Things – IoT), the large silos of data now handily available in the cloud, and users who continue to provide access for all sorts of bad guys and malicious attackers simply due to not understanding that they – the users – remain as the biggest vulnerability of all. It is educating this user and finding a way to get them to recognize their potential as a critical element in enhancing system security and reducing vulnerability that has become the larger challenge.

Leave a commentTech

Is ERP a Ready Made Meal in the Supermarket of Process?

There’s still a great appetite for ERP tools despite the fact that they’ve been around for quite some time. To me an ERP system is like a ready made meal - packaged, pre-processed and on the outside quite a nice idea. The idea behind ERP is that you have a bunch of processes that support key organisational capabilities built into an integrated software system. It’s a fix, but it doesn’t fix everything - there are always processes that need to be changed and gaps that need to be filled.

Leave a commentTech