For Jason Webster of Archteype Consulting Inc., the increasing use of business intelligence and corporate performance management software reflects a swing back toward accountability, driven partly by regulatory changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws that followed the corporate scandal. Some companies have taken the mandates and turned them into a competitive edge. More enterprises, using data visualization and analytics tools, inspired an analogy worthy of the Boston Marathon: “ If BI/CPM is the road that gets your organization there, your reporting and analytics solution is the last mile.”Data has never been easier to gather and analyze. And instead of overwhelming people with charts, reports and stacks of paper, online or ‘cloud-based’ dashboards or interactive analytics and visualization tools means any organization can consistently model/test/revise their strategy using real-time details to rapidly adapt to market conditions.
Data architecture, infrastructure and analytics projects are just some of the fields Archetype is working on, primarily in the financial services industries. Its partners also were part of the TIBCO Spotfire Financial Services Industry Forum in New York last November. Especially in regulated and globally-interconnected corporations, executive leadership needs provable plans, not annual forecasts that might miss the mark.
“It’s no longer enough to have an annual budget – you need the flexibility and facts to make it an ongoing process of forecasting, adjusting, reacting. It’s much the same way you drive using all the gauges on a dashboard while reacting to what you see in the windshield.”
Webster will be a keynote presenter at a CFO Forum event Jan 30 “Turning Analytics Into Action” that explores performance management and analytics best practices. After nearly a decade of CIOs getting attention (and budgets) for large IT projects, the pendulum is swinging back to CFOs who have to make that technology yield profits and efficiency.
“Technology is no longer an excuse. Data is available and only getting more so – especially now that so much of the workforce is remote or mobile. No one is chained to their desks,” he said. So it’s critical to have collaborative tools that use your data and quickly analyze and share to create better, smarter response. Regardless of what systems or technology platform, the results matter these days – not the tools in the kit.
