Have you ever wondered why organisations set an annual budget? Yes it fits in nicely with the way an organisation views performance; the way in which employees are reviewed for the work they do; and it’s easy to schedule. It’s September so it must be time to budget.
But there are also some major downsides:
PNC is going after tech-savvy customers with a digital-first money management marketing campaign called #BeTheBoss. The campaign turns traditional brand approaches to marketing on its ear, said Tom Kunz, senior vice president of digital at PNC.
The campaign starts with learning about customers and prospects. The bank has an audience management platform on its Web site that tracks non-personally identifiable information about visitors and develops segments. It adds in data about online shopping habits from various sources and combines it with financial information like investments and credit information and creates a demand management capability.
The bank then goes to online sites, publishers it calls them, and it can articulate what messages it plans to deliver to specific segments. Then it uses response data to see how the campaigns impact business.
To survive in today’s fast-changing business landscape, companies must develop exceptional skills in financial planning for the future. But constant economic uncertainty is making accurate forecasting more difficult than ever. Fortunately, planning, budgeting and forecasting can be successful with the right business intelligence (BI) tools. Powerful BI tools can decentralize the organization, optimize workflows and…
Public agencies, NGOs and non-profit IT organizations are exploring ways to use technology for something other than getting consumers to buy more stuff.
Big data and innovative uses of mobile technology are hot items in the international public sector, according to a story in today’s FT.
The UN’s Global Pulse is using a network of innovation labs to see how data tracking human behavior might improve responses to poverty, disease and humanitarian crises. Sarah Murray who wrote the article, said a trawl of online job sites at the UN and other agencies brings up a lot of openings for information officers, data warehouse experts and data analysts.
What is a stretch target?
First of all, what is actually meant by a stretch target. This can differ depending on where you sit. As the budget holder of a sales division this may mean setting sales targets that are higher than what would normally be expected. For production this may mean producing more goods for less, while marketing may see this as attracting more enquiries than last year.
Stretch targets are by definition, pushing the boundaries on what can be realistically achieved. And each has the increased potential to reduce organisational performance – the very opposite of what they were supposed to do. For example, if the increased production volume is not achieved but sales achieve their goal, then customers won’t get what they ordered in time. Similarly, if manufacturing achieve their goal but marketing falls short, then valuable resources will be tied up in stock. Both scenarios will adversely impact the company. In the first case it will be their reputation with customers, while the second will impact working capital. The end result of both will be to decrease profitability.
One of the problems about using terms such as ‘budgeting’ and ‘forecasting’, is that there is no generally accepted definition of what they mean. Budgeting is often referred to an annual exercise where the organisation’s resources gets spread among the departments, while forecasting is about predicting the future.
In recent times, forecasting is seen by some as a replacement for budgeting, and the mechanism through which continuous planning can be achieved. Given my understanding of ‘budgeting’ and ‘forecasting’ I would have to disagree – but it may be that I have misunderstood what is implied by these terms.
This makes it very confusing for organisations wanting to adopt a ‘best practice’ approach as they too may misunderstand what is meant. For example, making a statement such as ‘replace your outdated budgeting process with rolling forecasts’ could imply that budgeting is bad while forecasting is all you need. Which could be both right and wrong depending on how your understand what is meant by each.
Now I’ve got you totally confused, let me explain how I sees the difference between planning, budgeting and forecasting.
The information technology industry has seen a lot of disruption in recent years, with complexity and risk in systems rising as users demand more functional mobile capability and software developers struggle to protect and preserve their assets (users included). Skyline (by Uni-Data) is jumping right into the middle of it with Numecent, delivering solutions for software developers and cloud providers alike, and answering the question of whether it’s cloud or desktop. The answer is “yes”.
Corporate leaders are beginning to face the facts: The key to marketing and innovation is successfully harnessing the power of digital information.
Over the last few years, harnessing the power of information has presented itself as Big Data and accounting analytics. Big Data describes data sets that are so large and complex that traditional data management systems have difficulty processing them.
But one question remains…
For executives, project managers, and IT decision makers, going live with a new ERP is an exciting time. After all the planning and preparation, there’s often a great deal of optimism about the improvements a new ERP system has to offer. And, rightfully so. A well-deployed ERP system can help ease interdepartmental communication, improve efficiencies, turn data into actionable business intelligence, and enable a wide variety of other business benefits.
“The financial crisis and subsequent recession turned these efforts on their head, rendering almost every five-year plan into worthless scraps of paper,” according to the article.
While this opinion is apparently common, and may be true, it uncovers a need for both long-term planning and flexible adaptation.
Organizations clearly project for a reason. The reality is that, major worldly events, economic changes and other news worthy events happen all the time. It may not change your business overnight, but you can be sure change will happen over time.