by Rick Sherman on March 30, 2007 – 1:21 pm
Do you know where your financial data was last night? Sure, you know the operational and financial systems that it was in, but who else played with it before it got into your financial reports? What undocumented IT processes (horrors!) extracted data, manipulated it and then input into another system? And how many spreadsheets did the data get imported into, changed and then passed along to another spreadsheet?
It would be humorous if this was just happening to your competitors’ data. But it’s happening to yours. And it’s keeping your CFO up at night.
In my last post I introduced the concept of enterprise data management (EDM). I hope you were paying attention, because this is where a concept like EDM, where the business takes ownership of the data in cooperation with the IT group, starts to really pay off. You see, it’s only with an enterprise approach using EDM that you can really gain management effectiveness, corporate governance, and organizational alignment that impact the value of an enterprise. Read More »
by Garry Moroney on March 30, 2007 – 4:56 am
These days, savvy business executives understand that a report or analysis on their customers, markets, products or anything else is only as good as the data used to compile it. There is always a risk that the data used in the report may not be of sufficiently high quality. Similarly, business partners realize that integrating their systems with another company’s will only add value if the data flowing through the integration meets the required standards.
So more and more the message that data consumers are giving to data providers is: “before I accept this data from you, before I use it in my decision making processes or write it into my systems or pass it on to another party, prove to me that this is high quality data. Prove to me that the data is fit for purpose.
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by Rick Sherman on March 27, 2007 – 1:15 pm
Consistent, correct data. That doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? But actually, one of the most daunting challenges facing CFOs and their staffs today is how to ensure that the financial information they supply to stakeholders, both externally and internally, is consistent and correct.
The checklist for compliance seems to grow whenever you turn around. Sarbanes-Oxley, US Patriots Act, HIPAA. MiFID, Basel II, PCI data security standards, etc. – were these even part of our vocabulary several years ago?
Even when we have achieved statutory compliance, can we really audit our data from the point of origin to consumption? Why do we rely on so much manual reconciliation to audit and trace the data flows across systems each month, whether for cash flow forecasting or revenue recognition validation? Wasn’t each one of these financial systems supposed to get us the “single version of the truth?” Read More »
by Rick Sherman on March 24, 2007 – 9:35 am
Financial transparency. Auditability. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Thanks to governmental, industry and stockholder pressures, the work of financial managers has never been scrutinized so closely.
Do you feel the pressure? Of course you do. What’s the first step you should take? Investing in one of your enterprise’s most valuable assets: its data.
Where do you start? You may have invested in many IT systems in the past that promised data nirvana, commonly referred to by the IT community as a “single version of the truth” and are justifiably skeptical. We are going to take a different approach in this blog. We are going to examine your data from a holistic view across your enterprise – financial, marketing, sales, human resources, etc. We will discuss why, how and where to approach transforming your data into an enterprise information asset with Enterprise Data Management (EDM). This is not a product but an approach that you can act upon to dump your data silos and give your data the respect it deserves. Read More »
