Special Report
Business Intelligence is more important to finance directors than ever before. We bring you a range of views on what 2010 could throw up in this critical discipline..
>> Back to the Business Intelligence 2010 special report
Business Intelligence and the Finance Function |
|
|
| Special Reports | |
| Written by Ed Kiernan and Tom Skinner, Enterprise Performance Management team at Deloitte | |
| Friday, 22 January 2010 | |
|
Deloitte says in 2010 we will see some significant and far reaching improvements in Business Intelligence.
There is little doubt that Business Intelligence (BI) has made a significant impact on the finance function. As a result, it is now rare to find a finance function that does not make use of BI software to support key processes such as statutory consolidation, management reporting, performance analysis, or planning and budgeting. When taking a closer look, it is usually revealed that there are silos of information across the business linked to multiple Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and that data flows are complex and require significant mapping efforts and manual intervention. As well, reporting structures are usually poorly aligned with inconsistent use of master data and a lack of agreed definitions. Also, it is not uncommon to see new business ventures only semi-integrated into the accounts. These are poor foundations on which to build a BI platform and serious barriers to finance transformation initiatives or cost reduction efforts. That said, the last three years have seen significant consolidation in the software market for BI, and these changes are expected to bring better integration with core ERP and improved functionality. Therefore, it is time for the finance function to look again at BI and to learn from the mistakes of the past to ensure that future promises can be met. This increased focus on BI is likely to generate a number of key trends that will affect the CFO in 2010. For example, BI will increasingly make more data available to more users within organisations, which will be the result of the reducing cost of BI per user and improving data integration. In turn, finance will have to ensure that the data made available is appropriate and focused on what business users need to make better decisions. Too much information can be almost as bad as too little. The reliability of data will be of considerable significance in the year ahead. One complexity of BI implementations has been the integration of data from a variety of sources coupled with the need to ensure data quality. BI vendors have expanded the scope of their solutions to cover data quality with the ability to trace a number on a report back to its source. However, if business users do not trust the reports from their financial systems, the reports are worse than useless. The buck will always stop with the CFO on the reliability of financial information. 2010 will also see the growing importance of the integrated toolkit. The ideal of an integrated performance management toolkit, one that supports the core strategic planning, budgeting and regular forecasting processes, is now becoming a reality. As a result of this, finance will have the opportunity to set the vision and roadmap of how this will be delivered. The use of BI to better understand risk management is anticipated to be an emerging trend with organisations next year. BI will enable businesses to take informed decisions about risk as a competitive advantage. The analysis of key risk indicators will be as important as key performance indicators. Additionally, understanding the cost base and cost to serve is likely to be a key trend in 2010. While not itself a new idea, there is no doubt that as we emerge from difficult times, there will remain a substantial focus on cost control and the cost to provide services. BI vendors are integrating activity based management tools into their offering and these will have an important role to play in helping senior finance and business users identify priority area for focus. Finally, finance has a responsibility to ensure that any investment is based on a solid business case. The use of BI is no different. Finance needs to take a lead in ensuring that clear benefits are identified and these could include both process efficiency savings and, more importantly, the benefits of better decision making. Each of these areas offer challenges and opportunities for finance functions to make better use of BI. However, it is clear that a BI strategy is going to be more important than ever to the finance function in the new decade.
|
|
Digg it! 
del.icio.us 
Newsvine 
Reddit 
Stumble It! 
