Securely Plan Who, What, Where, and When at the Lowest Level

How do you securely plan who, what, where, and when at the lowest level?

Where planning usually falls down is when you try to marry the planning outcomes to operational decision making. In a plan you make decisions at high levels that are generally thought to be accurate based on historical trends. It’s a best guess using all of the information available at hand, and short of having a bat-phone to Cleo the Psychic, it’s your best option. My problem isn’t with the concept, or whether you use a 2 year CAGR versus a 3-month rolling average, it’s with how the planning assumptions are applied and how execution flows as a result.

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EPM View: An Interview with John O’Rourke, Vice President of Product Marketing, Oracle Corporation

John O’Rourke, one of the most seasoned veterans of the EPM industry, offers his perspective in this candid interview with Susan Serven. John shares his views on the future of EPM, the merger of Hyperion and Oracle, the most common misconceptions of EPM, his advice for a company just starting to consider implementing a performance management system, why Balanced Scorecard may have fallen out of favor, and many other insights.

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Is Excel the Most Dangerous Piece of Software in the World?

Microsoft’s calculator is partially to blame for JPMorgan losing $9bn, and a lot more besides.

Is Excel the most dangerous piece of software in the world? Baseline Scenario’s James Kwak reports on a little-mentioned aspect of the notorious “London Whale” debacle at JPMorgan, where Bruno Iksil headed a proprietary trading team which made losses of up to $9bn.

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arcplan Makes Chaos Comprehensible

arcplan makes its living on the chaos of its customers, is how Dwight deVera, senior vice president, describes the firm’s business.

Financial services firms are a favorite target since they always seem to be acquiring new businesses, meaning they have systems that don’t talk to each other, even if they come from the same vendor. When Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, both were running SAP.

“But you can’t consolidate across them. Just because they run the same software doesn’t mean that any of their requirements match. They have thousands of discrete requirements, and some requirements contradict others.” They could try to harmonize the two systems, said deVera, but they would never get the job done.

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Small Business Owner to Accountant: “Make Accounting Valuable to ME”

Accounting services should be useful to a business owner, providing valuable insight into the business performance and activity.  Accounting professionals believe their services have value, but find it difficult to express that value when selling their services to prospective clients. The problem is that most professional accounting firms believe that what they sell is accounting:…

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Dell Accelerates Servers For High Frequency Algo Trading

Dell has developed a speed edge for high frequency traders (HFT). The computer company has created firmware, the Dell Processor Acceleration Technology, for several of its high end Intel-based servers. It allows users to increase the speed of PowerEdge R620, R720 and R720xd servers with the Intel E5-2690 processor by 13 to 31 percent just through downloading a free BIOS update.

…Coming from Dell whose dull gray commodity computers were probably a major impetus behind the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement by users who wanted something more attractive to work on, is something of a surprise, but Barris says Dell is an HFT powerhouse.

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