CFO Leadership with Business Analytics – Nature or Nurture?

At the 2011 conference of The Association for Operations Management (APICS) where I was a presenter I attended a provocative talk by Alan G. Dunn, President and founder of GDI Consulting and Training Company. He questioned if leaders are born or can be grown. It is the classic “nature versus nurture” debate. It got me to thinking about whether business analysts within an organization can be more than a support to others. Can they be leaders? I share some of Alan’s thoughts.

What distinguishes strong from weak leaders?

Having all the knowledge means nothing without the right types of people. One person can make a big difference. They can be someone who somehow gets it altogether and changes the fabric of an organization’s culture not through mandating change but by engaging and motivating others.

For some leaders irritating people is not only a sport but it is their personal entertainment. They are rarely successful. Dunn referenced studies that conclude that the three primary success factor for effective leaders is technical competence, critical thinking skills, and communication skills.

Paving the Last Mile of Finance

The last mile of finance is an idea that has been popularized by Gartner. It addresses the business processes at the end of the financial close. This includes helping the CFO communicate with publishers, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and board members on financial and operational results. Included are reconciliation, close, and disclosure applications.

Deloitte, too, picked up on the idea noting that companies face many challenges with the financial close and reporting process. For Deloitte the last mile covers the processes and activities in between the trial balance and a company’s 10K. In this last mile organizations can experience management reporting and governance issues—including financial and internal control failures—resulting not only in significant inefficiencies but also financial errors and internal control failures.

The solution, according to Deloitte, calls for a holistic approach, which entails developing a road map for improvement to address the process, the policy, the people, and the technology issues, and how they successfully work together to improve the efficiency, governance, and quality of your financial reporting and close. Technology plays a key role.

Good Reasons to Refresh Your Online Presence

At a recent briefing IBM raised the idea that in any number of ways the Internet, Web—online computing—badly needs refreshing. Just look at what you are doing with online. Does it seem stale?

Consider this: the online experience now encompasses mobile, cloud, big data, social networking, and gamification. You probably didn’t deal with any of that when you initially got online. Then consider the devices connecting today, 15 billion mobile devices alone expected by 2015, estimates Cisco, plus the usual array of laptops, netbooks, desktops, thin devices. And who is connecting: Hispanics spent 5.15 billion through mobile devices this past holiday shopping season, according to Zpryme, a research firm. Did you get much of that?

Here are two more reasons the CFO might consider: online retailers may have lost $44.6B in 2010 due to online customer experience problems (Harris Interactive) or another—disengaged workers cost U.S. businesses as much as $350 billion a year (Gallup Research). It makes sense at least to revitalize the online experience for customers, workers, and partners.

Refreshing your online experience starts with a fresh strategy. You need to revisit the basics: your objectives, your various audiences, what they do with you online now and what more they could do. The recent trend is to do as much as possible online and to do it through multiple channels, such as mobile devices, social media, and online application services. Think beyond customers and workers to partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Sales Performance Management Market Heats Up

For many organizations sales performance management (SPM) means customer relationship management (CRM). Others simply ignore SPM, offering little in the way of sales productivity beyond basic contact management tools. Ventana Research, however, insists that SPM systems can help the organization understand how to get full value from the talent of its sales force. Used optimally, it adds, such a system can even deliver a competitive advantage.

Organizations need move beyond ad hoc tools and adopt real SPM, not CRM or sales force automation (SFA). Gartner analyst Patrick Stakenas notes that SPM, indeed, is breaking away from what has traditionally been considered CRM. There is no doubt, he declares, that having an SPM strategy and using supporting technologies can effectively and measurably improve sales revenue.

One sign that SPM as a catergory is picking up is IBM’s recent acquisition of Varicent Software, a leading SPM player. Varicent enables sales plan administrators and sales reps to conduct detailed ad hoc, self-service analysis without the need for IT assistance. It is not about sales force automation per se but about data analysis as a way to manage and improve sales performance.

Supercomputing Comes to Midsize and Non-Technical Enterprises

Supercomputing, with its ability to tackle the most complex problems and extremely large volumes of data fast, no longer is only for large organizations in scientific and technical fields. You don’t have to be unable to run a Monte Carlo simulation or two before you think a supercomputer might not be a bad thing for your organization too. The latest generation of high performance computing (HPC) systems put supercomputing capabilities into the hands of even midsize and non-technical organizations.
They can use HPC to solve the same complex, multi-dimensional problems that took way too long or were not even feasible with the usual corporate systems. The new generation of HPC can handle compute-intensive workloads as expected, but they also can handle big data processing fast.
And they do it in ways that don’t require big investments in more technology or the need to recruit a cadre of hardcore compute geeks. Where once supercomputing focused primarily on delivering megaflops (millions of floating point operations per second), now companies are looking to leverage affordable technical computing tools for complex problems that may be somewhat less complicated than, say, intergalactic navigation yet still deliver important business results .
Initially HPC or supercomputing was considered the realm of large government research being conducted by secretive agencies and esoteric think tanks. Today, HPC is poised to go mainstream.
Initially, automotive, aerospace, electronics, and petroleum companies were the primary HPC adopters, expecting it to deliver better product designs that result in higher quality, lower costs, and faster time to market. Now other industries are getting involved–financial services, media, telecommunication, and life sciences–by adopting HPC for modeling, simulations, and predictive analyses of various types.