IT holds the keys that can bring finance out of the back-office shadows and into the corporate limelight, according to the Best Practices Report for First Quarter 2010 from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). With better access to data, says TDWI, finance can “leverage the information it collects to assist executives and line of business managers to optimize processes, achieve goals, avert problems, and make decisions.”
Put another way: Finance could have a place at the strategy table.
For most companies, that would be a substantial change. Among the finance professionals who responded to the TDWI survey, relatively few think the finance department currently helps an organization “achieve its objectives” (41%), “refine strategies” (35%), “drive sales” (29%), or “optimize processes” (29%) to a high degree. And according to the report, the typical reason finance doesn’t have a strategy role is that “they are forced to spend too much time producing internal and statutory financial reports, which leaves little time to analyze data and collaborate with business managers.”
Since finance is often the last department to benefit from data warehousing and business intelligence—the report does a fine job of analyzing this disconnect, by the way—their data may exist in Excel silos (“spreadmarts”) that offer little strategic benefit. The TDWI survey results back up this analysis, finding that a significant majority of respondents from both the business side and IT/BI say their company’s finance department “does most of its work in Excel” and “spends too much time collecting and aggregating data.”
As the report details, it’s not an easy task to close the data disconnect and empower finance users with high-value analytical tools like self-service reporting, dashboards, and scorecards. In fact, the best reason for spending some serious time reviewing the TDWI document is the excellent overview of spreadmarts and a detailed look at best practices for overcoming the typical obstacles to change. In addition, the author (TDWI Research director Wayne Eckerson) presents a coherent, compelling vision of the huge benefits that could be gained from effective implementation of BI for finance.
Though many reports and white papers turn out to be more interesting than useful, this one has high value in both categories. Well worth a download!
Spotfire Blogging Team
Image Credit: Microsoft Office Clip Art
