Improving Corporate Performance Management

This is the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Improving Corporate Performance Management." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, product manager at InetSoft.

Welcome everyone. We are so pleased to have you here today to hear about the latest techniques to improve corporate performance management, what we are calling an intelligent pursuit, business intelligence. As you all know, the CFO is the steward of his or her company’s financial data, is likely closer to it, and understands it better than anyone else.

Now more than ever, the pressure is on to make sense of this data, to derive insight from it and define meaning in the numbers that help drive profitable business growth and avoid risky blunders. To do that well, to have the time to do it effectively, to find the answers that will help move the business forward, the Finance Department needs to be a well-oiled machine with a thoughtful leader.

And this leader, of course, is the CFO. He or she is entrusted with the duty to ensure the extensive collection, dissemination, and analysis of enterprise data for decision making purposes. This ability to provide such business intelligence quickly and accurately is a competitive advantage for the companies that efficiently attend to the task, improving overall corporate performance and shareholder & owner value.

Information May Not Be Readily Accessible

The challenges, however, to effectively meeting this obligation are multifaceted, particularly in this age of mobile computing and social media business interactions. As we will discuss during this webcast, it is not uncommon for data to reside all over the enterprise in disparate CRM, ERP, HRMS systems and nowadays even within the mobile business apps that employees increasingly use to enhance their personal productivity.

This treasure trove of information may not be readily accessible or integrated across these systems and devices or pushed up to C-level dashboards to guide the improved decision making that all of us seek. Obviously, the CFO is the one to ensure that this vital information is available to relevant users anywhere, at any time, and on any kind of device.

The opportunities to take advantage of accurate and timely business intelligence are endless in this era of social media, mobility, and the cloud, but there are steep obstacles in the way. During this webcast, you will feel a strong undercurrent of data insight and analytics, an area that is exploding right now with ever more data and ever more varied and powerful tools to analyze the impact and import.

Let’s take a look at illustration I put together for this part of the discussion. I would like to share with you the perspective that in the past year there was a shift happening in the marketplace. We have been talking in the industry about overlapping trends if you will, the Venn diagram you see here on the left. We saw the trends of social, and by social we mean connectively; mobile, by mobile we mean mobile data as well as mobile access; and cloud both private cloud and public cloud. They are beginning to have these areas of overlap in the Venn diagram. and there were many that were talking about that. We began to see that this was part of a larger movement with this area of overlap actually. There is actually one converged construct here, a continuum, if you will, from cloud at the core where data resides to the edge of the cloud which the mobile endpoint is and where social is every connection from any endpoint to any other endpoint through the cloud.

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Look at the Technology Stack

As simple as that sounds, as reductively logical that that sounds, it is transformative to business and has a big potential impact to the CFO and operations generally. We see this incredible operational efficiency opportunity. First of all, when you look at the technical construct, you look at the technology stack. In other words, there is a single technology infrastructure here. We are not talking about a separate infrastructure for cloud or for mobile or for social. We are talking about one construct. So for the CFO that means that they can now look at, if you were enforcing this culturally, enforcing this in cooperation with or participation with the CIO as well as the CTO, how can the operational efficiency in the organization’s existing investments be unlocked and unleashed?