Podcast: More Overlap in the CFO/IT Department Relationship
October 1, 2008
Five years ago, only 28 percent of CFOs surveyed by Robert Half Management Resources saw IT as their second most important area of expertise behind accounting and finance. In a new survey, says Executive Director Paul McDonald, that portion has shot up to 50 percent.
Icon by Damian Yerrick used under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Comments
Got something to say?
Quick Takes for the Week of June 29
July 3: Last week, Timo Elliott, who runs the BI Questions Blog, offered a post last week in which he laid out the reporting requirements of the stimulus package and made the point that it essentially mandates the use of business intelligence tools. Elliott details some of the ramifications of this. He says that major vendors—he mentions SAP and IBM—have rolled out products and details some of what is available.
July 2: ZDNet blogger Sam Diaz notes that MicroStrategy is making its reports and dashboards available on the Amazon Kindle DX reader. Diaz is skeptical about the device as a business tool. The post raises a broader and interesting question: Just how useful will non-traditional mobile devices, such as MIDs and netbooks, be for business intelligence?
July 1: Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics suggests that the next generation of business intelligence can be categorized into a small number of fresh approaches: analysts tools; dashboards; open-source and free; targeted solutions; advanced visualizations and, in Gemignani’s words, “other stuff.” The piece offers multiple screen shots and descriptions of who Gemignani thinks are the key vendors in each of the categories.
June 30: silicon.com asks a question that probably has been answered in the affirmative by anyone visiting this site, but is far from settled in many other quarters: Is BI a key investment during a recession? The Naked CIO, a columnist for the site, suggests that the answer is no if the BI platform is used solely as a financial reporting system. The value becomes greater, he suggests, if a comprehensive strategy using data of good quality is implemented. Silicon.com blogger Peter Cochrane suggests that such platforms are key: “I can't imagine running any business without good intelligence tools - they are essential to business and always a good investment,” he says.
June 29: Jorgen Heizenberg, the principal technology officer for BI at Capgemini Netherlands, offers a short but intriguing post at his blog on the differences between what he terms “operational systems” such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and “informational systems” such as business intelligence. Perhaps, he suggests, BI would be more successful if it became more operational in nature.
--Carl Weinschenk
