The Sound and the Fury of Enterprise-Wide Process Management

When did “customer centric” first become the clichéd buzzword it has turned into today?

Fifteen years ago, perhaps? “We’re CUSTOMER CENTRIC!” “The customer is always right; We put the customer first!” Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah … And then they trot out their customer-centric diagrams, typically something circular /radial with the CUSTOMER in the bulls-eye, depicted visually either as encircled like the Siege of Stalingrad, or else as being attacked like a parasite by assorted organizational macrophages. Over time these representations evolved into a pyramid structure, with the customer either at the BASE, purportedly demonstrating how everything at this organization emanates from the customer, or at the APEX, showing the customer as the ultimate goal of the organization’s functions and activities.

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CFO Magazine’s CPM Conference

CFO magazine’s CFO Corporate Performance Management Conference will be held in Philadelphia this year, January 27-29. CPM will present the latest thinking about the most critical aspects of finance today, from working capital management, cost modeling, and risk management to strategy and talent development.

Receive a $500 discount when you register via EPM Channel’s web site. For more info, please visit our web site and click on the CFO.com CPM link. Use discount code EPMCDSC for $500 off conference prices.

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Tell the Story

What’s the story of your organization, your business?

There’s a story there, there always is. Numbers on a spreadsheet don’t do it justice. Yes, there is the annual report, but first, who reads it, and second, that’s just the point – it’s “annual”. The story of your business is dynamic, it runs all year long, 24/7. Numbers and metrics are only part of if.

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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 Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

Most of us are technical. We like to be fact-driven. We embrace technologies of all flavors, including computer hardware, software, mobile devices, the Internet and social media. We tolerate opinions of others that differ from ours, but we prefer tangible, hard evidence that supports any position or argument. The problem is that organizations are made up of people, not just computers and equipment.

We like research studies and analytics to gain insights and foresights, as well as to solve problems and pursue opportunities. But, darn it, people get in the way.

Leave a commentaccounting, Biz Intelligence, CapEx, Finance, FP&A, 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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