Tools ease pain of older methods and offer new insights
Today's IT directors and their management colleagues face
unprecedented challenges.
On the one hand, economic uncertainty dictates that businesses
streamline, manage costs and hold off on hiring to meet bottom-line
targets. On the other hand, signs of an improving economy demand
that businesses invest in new opportunities to drive top-line
profitable growth.
It is the classic mandate of "do more with less", with the added
pressure of knowing that every major decision, every performance
disclosure and every financial report will be scrutinised as never
before.
Many organisations today rely on spreadsheets as their primary tool
for managing performance. Trapped in spreadsheet hell, they employ
legions of analysts and IT specialists to manually extract valuable
information locked in transactional systems and use it to populate
a variety of homegrown reports for decision makers.
Although these reports can be helpful, they are painful and
time-consuming to produce as well as prone to error.
They are also typically based on fragmented information created in
silos - by business unit, geography or function - which means they
often present an incomplete or narrow view of what is happening in
a company.
And, as anyone who has used them will testify, they are
frustratingly static, making it difficult and time-consuming to
drill down to the information needed to answer the inevitable
questions these kinds of reports raise in the minds of top
managers. For example, "Our sales in Japan were up just 2% this
quarter. How does that compare with sales in previous quarters and
in the same quarter a year ago?"
Fortunately, help is at hand. Management processes and business
systems that improve future performance are the work of business
performance management, a category of enterprise software that
replaces spreadsheets and static reports with more flexible,
scalable and dynamic tools.
Business performance management software goes beyond the specific
functions automated by transactional systems - accounting,
billings, bookings, supply chain, and salesforce automation.
Consisting of a consolidation and analytics platform and financial
and business applications, business performance management products
use data from these systems to increase visibility, drive
forecasts, predict results, manage financial and operational
performance, and report on outcomes both internally and
externally.
Seasoned IT directors understand that no one piece of software can
solve all of their problems, and they are weary of new acronyms.
However, business performance management software can at least help
fill in the gaps for the reams of reporting data demanded by
regulators.
To order the book 01784-228015'enquiryuk@hyperion.com