GAO Issues Report Outlining Mobile Security

Mobile devices have become incredibly popular in the consumer and enterprise worlds, as more businesses begin to see the benefits of cultivating a strong bring your own device (BYOD) policy. Several reports have revealed that corporate expenditures, both capital and operational, can be reduced by allowing employees to bring in their own technology.

However, security remains a major question among those with executive jobs, as unsecured devices can spell disaster by way of data breach and loss of corporate information. It is the responsibility of a business’ decision-makers to ensure the integrity of all information technology (IT) operations, which can be mitigated through IT departments.

Leave a commentFinance, Management, Risk Management, Tech

How to Deal with Continuing Volatility

Since 2008, the global business community has operated under extraordinary circumstances. After years of crises, extreme volatility and unforeseen events, the extraordinary is now the ordinary and the previously unthinkable is a reality. Companies that once prepared detailed, long-range plans—with budgets based on a stable view of the future—now operate in an environment that presents new and unforeseen challenges every day, week and month.

What are the critical issues leading to more uncertainty?

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Conversational Analytics

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than you might initially think, the most important courses you took in college turn out to be psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology.

We all bring important skills to the myriad of different conversations we participate in every day, and while confrontation and intervention might not be your cup of tea, applying the right type of analytics to the problem, consistent with its level in the Conversation Pyramid, can immediately make you and your team valuable in either catalyzing your own organizational transformation, or simply improving your organization’s value creation or mission effectiveness.

2 CommentsBiz Intelligence, Careers, Finance

Triangles, Tools, and Transformations

Whether you know it or not, you are already doing driver-based budgeting and forecasting with your spreadsheets today, but in a very restricted fashion, with only one primary driver, typcially ‘headcount’ for most line items, and defaulting to a weighting of 100%. Not terribly sophisticated, not at all transformative, but ever since VisiCalc it’s been all we’ve had to work with.

Those days are now over.

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Performance Measurement in the Banking Industry

After the financial crisis that began in 2008, banks are taking steps to improve their performance measurement capabilities in light of changed economic and market conditions and new management needs. For example, new regulatory strictures are affecting the underlying economics of such businesses as payment-card issuing and processing. Capital requirements are increasing for most banking businesses.

New channels like mobile phones are becoming more important. Revenue growth continues to be difficult to achieve due to weak economic conditions, low interest rates and regulatory restrictions. Banks are trying to manage costs better, deepen relationships with customers and enhance product mix and pricing decisions.

These and other factors are causing banks to re-examine and improve the ways in which they measure and report business performance.

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How to Strengthen Risk Management, Candidly Speaking

Organizational cultures that lack candor, Ferrazzi Greenlight CEO Keith Farrazzi tells us, endure longer cycle times, slow decision-making, unnecessarily iterative discussions and below-average financial performance. Even worse, a lack of candor can dumb down a company’s risk intelligence and, in some cases, lead to catastrophe. In the January-February Harvard Business Review, Ferrazzi writes: “My team interviewed executives…

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The Problem with the Profit Motive in Finance

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.

Leave a commentaccounting, Finance, Risk Management