Security and Users: Change is the Only Constant

Managing user accounts and access to business IT assets is challenging, particularly as cloud and social computing models introduce new wrinkles in security and identity management. Information has become “mobile” along with the users accessing it, yet management of user behavior is even more complicated that trying to manage a digital resource.

If you look at the history of security breaches, you’ll find that many of them started with a user making a mistake – like losing a laptop or clicking on a phishing email, downloading bad software, or forgetting to report an employee termination to the IT dept – something which inadvertently created a vulnerability that could be exploited. It’s tough to stop breaches because there are so many possible ways for them to happen.

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Finance Teams in Asia: How They Stack Up Against Global Leaders

CEB’s Finance Pathfinder Research of 2200 finance staff at over 75 global organizations found that Finance is increasingly required to take a guidance-based role in supporting business decisions and facilitating business partnership. Forces such as geographic dispersion, matrixed structures, and information technology proliferation coupled with increasing demands from the business are driving this change. Most finance departments…

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How Can Advanced Financial Management Systems Make You A More Strategic CFO

For decades, financial managers have pieced together and manipulated spreadsheets in order to report on past data and maintain the financial integrity of their businesses. Sure, if they had time, they could use these primitive tools to attempt to identify trends and offer insights. But this effort was ridden with information silos, dirty data and outdated numbers.

Fortunately, times are changing.

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The Crisis of Competency in Accounting and Finance

The roles of today’s accounting professionals are being reinvented, requiring new skills far beyond audit, tax and compliance competencies.

The finance function is a key part of business strategy, but many professionals don’t learn the skills needed to develop strategy, inform decision making, or communicate with influence. “Accountant” remains one of the hardest jobs for employers to fill, and 50 percent of finance executives can’t find staff with the right skills. This talent gap is, in fact, a crisis.

This “Competency Crisis” has gone unsolved for decades, and it’s affecting businesses’ operations potential for future growth. The problem has been studied at length by academics and professional accounting organizations. A variety of factors, including a narrowly focused accounting curriculum and lack of on-the-job training, are part of the problem, but clearly, there is no silver bullet that will make accounting and finance professionals excel at a global level.

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Finance Transformation: Five Mistakes to Avoid

Even the most high-performing finance teams occasionally slip up – especially when trying to transform the way their department operates. Only 12% of finance leaders responding to a recent survey said their transformation projects achieved all of their intended business outcomes.

Through our research into finance transformation, we’ve identified five common mistakes many CFOs make:

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5 Reasons Not to Cut Your 2014 Marketing Budget

Understand the changing role of marketing and you’ll likely want to re-examine how you value and fund this function.

As budgeting season approaches, we huddle around projector screens and decide how to best allocate the overall expenditure budget. We try to determine which expenses are likely to have the biggest impact on growing the top and bottom lines.

After more than 15 years in the industrial world, I’ve learned one certainty: marketing budgets are the most unloved of all budgets at most industrial companies. It also raises two crucial questions:

Why is marketing the first budget line to get axed when the overall numbers don’t jive?
Is doing more with less really the path to success?
There are five good reasons why maintaining a smart and healthy marketing budget could be the most important thing you do to ensure the future of your business.

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An Accountant’s Coming of Age Story

Accountants are a strange breed. They love math and numbers. Many love the feeling of control. They start out young. Later in their career most experience a “coming of age” and shift from bean counters to bean growers.

We were all once young. We all experienced growing pains. This article is about the coming of age of accountants. Their maturing is an especially painful process.

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Is it Cloud or is it Desktop?

The information technology industry has seen a lot of disruption in recent years, with complexity and risk in systems rising as users demand more functional mobile capability and software developers struggle to protect and preserve their assets (users included). Skyline (by Uni-Data) is jumping right into the middle of it with Numecent, delivering solutions for software developers and cloud providers alike, and answering the question of whether it’s cloud or desktop. The answer is “yes”.

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