The Skeptical CFO

It came as a bit of a shock that some customers just weren’t going to pay you. For no good reason. I would ask if perhaps the delivery had been short, or was late, or something went wrong with the implementation, or they were trying to use it as leverage on another deal, or maybe they were having cash flow problems themselves. If so, we could work something out. No, it wasn’t any of those things, this was simply how they treated all their vendors, they’d pay us when they felt like it, or maybe they wouldn’t pay us at all.

Leave a commentFinance, Management, Risk Management

The Higher You Are, The Less You Know

Executives may be brilliant strategists. But strategists need foot soldiers to carry out tasks. The higher the executives are, the less they can know about what is happening. Yes, there can be summarized reporting and executive scorecards and dashboards. But monitoring the dials is not the same thing as moving the dials.

What strategies are most useful as performance improvement levers?

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15th Century Big Data - What Can We Learn From It?

“Big Data” is in vogue today. It’s the new fashion in business and technology. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to explain but somehow managed to trek from the Technology Street to Wall Street and now blazing its trails into the Main Street.

The technocrats, the data scientists and the business executives are claiming that there hasn’t been anything like this throughout the human history.

But, is this true?

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Numbers Speak for Themselves, But Who’s Listening?

The NBA professional scouts saw little in (Harvard University graduate and NBA star Jeremy) Lin. But a FedEx delivery truck driver, Ed Weiland, was paying attention. Weiland was a contributor to the website HoopsAnalyst.com blog.

Weiland predicted that Lin would be an exceptional talent based on the combination of two statistics: two-point field goal percentage and RSB40. The first stat is obvious, but the second completed the picture about Lin. RSB40 is a combination statistic measuring rebounds, steals and blocked shots (the RSB) per 40 minutes. Lin’s high index for these two stats revealed his dominance at both ends of the basketball court. Weiland’s prediction was initially ignored. Now he appears to be clairvoyant.

Who knew? Was it Ed Weiland? Or were the numbers already there, and Ed Weiland was listening?

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What’s the Biggest Barrier Finance Needs to Overcome?

Only 5% of respondents say their Finance organization is delivering Game Changing Value today? But, 42% say there’s potential to deliver game-changing value. What’s that about? Find out.  www2.apqc.org/l/4922/2012-09-19/bb7f9 A study conducted by APQC and EPM Channel argues that CFOs must now double-down on their investments in finance team training and development. The sense of urgency stems…

Leave a commentaccounting, CapEx, Finance, FP&A, Management, Risk Management

To BI and Beyond: A BI Primer

While the first use of the term “business intelligence” was in a 1958 paper by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, it was Howard Dresner in 1989 (later with Gartner) who defined the term and the practice as we now recognize it. Even I could have invented the concept in 1999, but it was Dresner’s talent that he recognized a decade earlier that the disparate data warehouse, analytic and reporting projects and initiatives needed to be unified under a single umbrella.

The fundamental problem that BI addresses is: scarce IT resources.

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The CFO’s Expanding Role – Reality or Delusion?

“Modern financial executives are moving toward a more central and expanded role as stewards of the company’s longevity, using the finance function to enable growth, especially in new markets and in response to market changes. For those who are ready for change, the new finance is an exciting and rewarding way to help shape a more intelligent enterprise that is better connected to the market and its customers.

To be a devil’s advocate, what proof do we have that Gianni’s observation is true?

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Inside Walmart Labs - How the World’s Largest Retailer Hopes to Sell More By Getting Social

One of the most head-scratching tech headlines of April 2011 was the news thatKosmix, a Mountain View, CA-based startup best known for building a Twitter filtering tool called TweetBeat, had been acquired by Walmart. Yes, that Walmart—the one with 9,000 big-box stores spread across the American heartland.

There was speculation that Walmart’s real interest was in Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have unbeatable pedigrees in the world of e-commerce technology. The pioneering comparison shopping site they co-founded in 1996, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million; inside Amazon, the pair helped to create the e-retailer’s huge marketplace of third-party retailers and came up with the technology behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. Perhaps Walmart—which paid $300 million for Kosmix, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—wanted Harinarayan and Rajaraman to work similar miracles for Walmart.com?

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