By Ian Yates, Managing Director at Barcanet
To create value from data, you do need a big data strategy – right?
Well, actually, probably not. According to Gartner, the ‘all-encompassing data strategy’ fails around 60% of the time. In fact, Gartner have even stopped publishing a Big Data ‘Hype Cycle’ (their measure of maturity and adoption of technologies).
By Ian Yates, Managing Director at Barcanet
Business users want the power of analytics – but analytics can only be as good as the data being analysed. A survey by TDWI has revealed best practices to improve data preparation, finding 76% of businesses hope to increase data-driven decision making and 37% are currently unequipped to do so. There are 5 signs that reveal the need for better data preparation.
By Emmanuel Jibodu, Sr. Analyst, Global Finance - Stericycle Inc.
"We are drowning in data but starving for actionable insight"
- Unknown
The Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) function has become more prominent in the decision making process in most large organizations because of the emergence of BIG DATA (large volumes of unstructured and structured data). Today, most companies have access to vast amounts of data (financial and operational) and must figure out how to use it to drive growth and profitability.
By Irina Steenbeek, ABN AMRO Bank N.V. , Data management consultant, http://datacrossroads.nl
A couple of weeks ago I joined the meeting of the Amsterdam FP&A Board where we discussed the subject of the FP&A analytical transformation. In the course of the meeting the participants mentioned their current main concerns, some of which such as Data ownership, Data quality, and Business Glossary (‘Speaking the same language’). This surprised me. Why? Because these topics are ‘hot’ topics of Data Management (DM) with no common vision on the subject.
As a result I decided to write several articles on these topics for FP&A professionals. The main purpose is to share some knowledge and practical experience and to start a discussion about these subjects.
By James Myers, Global Finance Executive and Finance Transformation Consultant
It’s the middle of the year and it’s time to take charge of your “data destiny” before the budgeting and planning season starts. What exactly is your data destiny? No, it’s not the new Netrunner card game where the objective is to control all the data in the Universe.
It’s understanding how you can leverage all your internal and external financial and operational data to give you a strategic advantage. Relevant data is the key to understanding it all, but too often this is disbursed throughout your organization.