APQC Survey on Financial Improvement Programs

What improvement programs are Finance organizations embarking on today? What level of commitment are they making, and in what areas? These are some of the questions APQC and IEG researched in a compelling new whitepaper.

145 organizations participated in the survey and some of the findings are quite surprising.

The fact that eight out of ten organizations are now pursuing major process improvements is significant for three reasons. First, prior to the global financial crisis, CFOs by and large were mainly interested in incremental process improvements to save money. The slogan “do more with less” summed up the general attitude. But now we have strong evidence that CFOs want to deliver effectiveness as well as efficiency. The overwhelming majority of survey respondents indicated they are now pursuing these goals simultaneously.

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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 This Man Save the American Economy?

Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans has an ingenious plan to jump-start job creation. His Fed colleagues should listen to him.

Can talking differently boost the economy? It sounds like a silly idea, but as long as the talkers have the right jobs, there’s considerable theoretical reason to believe they can make a huge difference. New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows that talk does matter and that the Fed could significantly improve the economy by choosing its words better.

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Are Accountants Homo Accounticus?

I enjoy maturity and evolution models of all kinds, especially for business. There is a stages of maturity model for information technologies and others such as for sales teams and their customer relationships. What I like about stages of maturity models is they provide confidence that regardless what stage one is at – low or high – there is a next step further up that can be attained in an evolutionary way.

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