How Finance Can Help Drive Company Growth
For a company seeking new ways to maximize revenue and establish predictable revenue streams, the Finance team would seem the best place to go for guidance.
Why We Love and Hate Models
A model is meant to be a simplified representation of reality created for a specific purpose. We often try to build models to understand the flow and interactions between different parts of a system or predict certain outcomes. Think of a map used to navigate from point A to point B. Although it may not include every street, it shows some of the main paths to follow to get to point B, which is what we need.
Models need to rely on assumptions that don’t always apply perfectly to reality. This frustrates many of us, and even makes us wonder why we use models if they rely on faulty assumptions.
Game On! A TV Game Show for IT and Analysts?
Imagine a game show featuring three competing teams of contestants who are given a business problem involving choices. They get one week to design and test their hypotheses through experiments and return to the show with their answers. A panel of CEOs would judge the winning team.
Why not provide analysts, and the important role they perform, more visibility to the public? Make it fun. The popular TV show “The Big Bang Theory” highlights physicists. So why not have a TV game show for analysts and IT specialists to show off their investigative and discovery skills? We might call it “The Big Data Theory!”
CFOs May Do It On The Cheap
CFOs see greater need for accurate, timely data, but may do it on the cheap. They want to boost finance’s analytic, modeling, and forecasting capabilities while maximizing tech’s ROI, says Hackett, even though cost pressures will limit them.
Corporate Performance Management Heats Up
“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.