A zero based budget is a budget where every dollar you earn is assigned to a category in your budget. Your income minus your expenses equals zero – zero based budget. The idea sounds very simple, and it is, but the real value in creating and following a zero-based budget is that it requires you to plan very deliberately ahead of time and track it very closely as you go through your month.
“The market for corporate performance management (CPM) suites continues to grow rapidly,” declared Gartner in its latest Magic Quadrant for CPM suites. Why? Gartner explains: “because CPM has helped to manage cost optimization efforts and is now increasingly employed in supporting growth-based strategies.”
That certainly was what led the AAA in west/central New York to opt for CPM from Prophix Software. “We’re able to provide our executive team with business information faster than ever before and do analysis on the information so they can see why something is up or down,” said Kristy Chapman, the auto club’s financial planning and reporting manager.
After decades of badgering companies to backup their data, many organizations are still only just joining the backup bandwagon. They do it mainly because the auditors or regulators put a gun to their heads.
Over the years, backup and recovery has gotten much simpler and faster due to disk-to-disk (D2D) backup. And continuously falling disk prices combined with deduplication and compression technology has made D2D backup even cheaper.
You can listen to your CIO, or you can ignore her. After all, how important — really — is IT to your business?