“Finance transformation” is a trend gaining favor with strategic consultants. The term is associated with the objective of shifting the focus of CFOs and finance departments from transaction processing toward more strategic and higher-value functions.
The Financial Services Roundtable, the lobbying group for the biggest financial companies in the U.S., has a new “white paper” out with the rah rah title, “Financial Services: Safer & Stronger in 2012.” A few of the bullet points:
•Banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have $1.5 trillion in capital — the highest capital levels in the history of American banking.
• The largest U.S. banks have increased Tier 1 capital — the core measure of a bank’s financial strength from a regulator’s point of view — by nearly 50 percent over the last four years.
• Executive compensation has been reformed significantly to align with long-term performance.
• Banks have developed fortress balance sheets, improving credit quality by 54 percent, increasing net income and, restoring aggregate lending to pre-crisis levels of nearly $7 trillion.
New generation BI tools like 1KEY BI do not need semantic layer. The semantic layer is a business translation layer that sits between the database and the end user which was the traditional way of generating reports with old aged BI software tools.
There are two primary purposes of budgeting. The one most people think of first is to put a cap spending. But that’s only one reason why organizations (and people) budget.
The other reason why organizations budget is to ensure what’s important gets done. And let’s face it, just because something is important doesn’t mean it will get done. Unless it’s properly resourced and funded, it won’t happen. So let’s examine that crucial link between budgeting and execution.
Over the years, I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who have been frustrated by low profits, lack of growth, or the stress of the never-ending demands. Many struggle with all three. While every business is different, there are common denominators. In fact, I believe there are 10. The tricky part is that failing to have a handle on just one of these areas can result in mediocre performance, a stressful existence, or ultimate and intimate failure. That is one reason the failure rate for small businesses is so high (here aresome others).
I was just reading about how Barack Obama and George W. Bush are the most polarizing presidents of the past 50 years, meaning they had the largest gap in approval ratings between democrats and republicans.
Some think there’s a chicken and egg aspect to the question of which came first, our divisive leaders or our divided nation, but I think it’s entirely a function of leadership. If Obama and Bush were effective leaders, the nation wouldn’t be so divided.
I hit a big goal of mine – finally – just before 2011 ended. I finished writing the novel I began five or so years ago. When I say finished, however, what I mean is that the very first, very rough draft is complete, ringing in at just under 80,000 words.
Know how that novel got written? One single, small word at a time, with lots of mistakes along the way. I learned what not to do, and through that, I learned what works.
People who perform the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function in the finance organization put together and update the budgets and forecasts. In many companies, the “A” portion of this activity gets short shrift. That’s because the mechanical process of pulling together and collating the data takes up so much time that very little remains for analysis. The result is that planning and budgeting is a less useful business tool than it could be. Improving FP&A can give executives and managers more insightful analytics and easier access to analytical tools that support more accurate and timely planning and budgeting.
Instead of debating the relative merits of rolling forecasts over annual budgets, the right question to ask is “What’s the best way for us to plan in our organization?” Because maybe the answer involves elements of both.
In Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch, Shawn Parr at Fast Company makes an extremely seductive argument. Though he doesn’t mention it, this type of analysis goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Except that Mahan does not fall into this trap of concluding that culture matters more than strategy.
I don’t mean to pick on Parr’s article in particular, but it is representative of a lot of very well-intentioned, feel-good writing about strategy that seems to be appearing these days. Parr’s is one of the more solid ones. Here’s an excerpt.