Finance departments don’t immediately come to mind in conversations about social collaboration technology. Most of the software used for social collaboration that I’ve seen demonstrated focuses on the sales process or for broader employee engagement. The Facebook-style interface may cause finance department managers and executives to roll their eyes, especially if they’re over 40 years old. Yet business and social collaboration is an important set of capabilities that has been taking hold in business. Our benchmark research shows it ranking second behind analytics as a technology innovation priority. It will gain adoption over the next several years as software transitions from the rigid constructs established in the client/server days, which force users to adapt to the limitations of the software, to fluid and dynamic designs that mold themselves around the needs of the user. Perhaps because most of the attention so far on the benefits of collaboration has focused on front-office roles, there’s less awareness of the potential in back-office and administrative functions. Indeed, the same research reveals that those in front-office roles five times more often than those in accounting and finance roles (21% vs. a mere 4%) said that business and social collaboration are very important to their organization. However, I assert it’s just a matter of time before the finance group understands that social collaboration has substantial potential to improve its performance.
Read More
Topics:
Customer Experience,
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
communications,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CRM,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Social,
FPM
In some parts of the world, bribing government officials is still considered a normal cost of doing business. Elsewhere there has been a growing trend over the past 40 years to make it illegal for a corporation to pay bribes. In the United States, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in 1977 in the wake of a succession of revelations of companies paying off government officials to secure arms deals or favorable tax treatment. More recently other governments have implemented anticorruption statutes. The U.K., for instance, enacted the strict Bribery Act in 2010 to replace increasingly ineffective statutes dating back to 1879. The purpose of these actions is to enable ethical and law-abiding companies to compete on a level playing field with those that are neither. A cynic might wonder about the real, functional difference between, say, Wal-Mart’s recent payments to officials in Mexico to accelerate approval of building permits and the practice in New York City of having to engage expediters to ensure timely sign-offs on construction approval documents. No matter – the latter is legal (it’s a domestic issue, after all) while the former is not.
Read More
Topics:
SAP,
ERP,
Governance,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
bribery,
Business Analytics,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Operational Intelligence,
Oracle,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
compliance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
FPM,
Oversight Systems
At this year’s Global Pricing Forum, host Nomis Solutions announced the availability of its Discretion Manager software, which supports dynamic price negotiations. The annual event brings together thought leaders and practitioners interested in pricing. Nomis currently has 17 of the largest 100 banks as customers. With more customers, this year’s event had larger attendance than last year’s.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
credit,
financial analytics,
Nomis Solutions,
PRO,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
banking,
Financial Services
