A Poorly Managed Company’s Tour Guide

Publicly traded companies issue annual reports that increasingly look like magazines. Almost all organizations publish a brochure with glossy pictures that describe what their organizations do. In either case they are very traditional, and many look the same. What is needed is a new idea – a better way to communicate their branding and positioning message in a similar way that international countries’ government tourist agencies promote their nations to attract tourists.

Follow us on a chronological “tour” with our “tour guide” Gary Cokins, who will explain how this fictional company, Mesdup (get it? as in Messed Up) relaunched itself into a successful brand by incorporating EPM measures.

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Evaluating EPM Technology Solutions

In previous articles we have looked at the content of an EPM Framework that is better able to support decision-making around performance management. In this article we will be looking at the evaluation and selection of a suitable technology system that supports the requirements discussed in previous articles.

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How To Identify The Tipping Point In Any System

The term “tipping point” crops up frequently, especially in discussions of world events such as financial collapse and climate change. Like the word “sustainable” which gets used with increasing abandon, and often with little thought to the actual meaning of the word, so too the term tipping point can be elusive and used in contexts where it may or may not be suitable. I’ve probably been guilty of this myself, but recently my thinking on the subject has been greatly clarified and I hope to pass on what I’ve learned about what does, and does not, constitute a tipping point.

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Can Your Customer Benefit from the Data You’re Capturing about Them?

Companies today amass vast amounts of data about their customers, hundreds of gigabytes of data flowing in from unstructured sources like social media sites; clickstream data from their own websites, partner websites, blog posts, emails, and other forms of communications; and structured data from their CRM systems, POS systems, service centers, warranty data, and other transactional interactions.

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Thinking…Fast and Slow

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend.

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How Smart Is Business Intelligence?

Everywhere one turns these days, one hears about Big Data, Business Intelligence (BI), and analytics, and ways in which they can be consolidated through new technologies to grant businesses the god-like ability to peer into the very souls of their customers (by reading their Twitter feeds, Facebook postings, and even logging their mouse movements), optimize every business function under the sun, and allow financial planners to run so many “what if” scenarios in their FP&A processes that for every question the future may pose — strategic or operational, micro- or macroeconomic — the right answer will come running, eager to present itself.

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New Conditions Call for New Approaches to Forecasting and Planning

It has been more than three years since the global economic crisis battered investors, consumers and businesses alike. While there are signs of stabilization, the environment continues to be full of surprises, as witnessed by the recent battles over the U.S. debt ceiling. The situation in Europe offers little relief, with a series of sovereign debt concerns casting doubt on the fate of the Euro and the ongoing solvency of the European Union’s weaker participants. With slow growth and high levels of employment in the United States, the outlook is for more uncertainty.

Leave a commentFinance, FP&A