{Excerpt from Strafford's Whitepaper on Breaking through the Barriers to Performance Management}
Today’s CFOs have little choice but to break through the silos between standard financial reports and the rest of the organization. They face even bigger risks if they do not. Given the increasing velocity of business, executives simply can not wait for traditional bookkeeping to reveal whether the collective impact of day-to-day financial decisions is bad. Given today’s increasingly narrow margins, there is a greater likelihood that many of those decisions will be bad. A merger, a reorganization, a new distribution agreement, a pricing decision — these and countless other actions large and small — must often be done quickly. Even so, they should still reflect a measured assessment of the various alternatives available to the business. Without proper insight into business drivers, how will that assessment be done effectively?
For many companies, the need is not a new one. What is new, however, is the increasing inadequacy of the “brute force” method most companies use to draw this insight. The joke about finance people working longs hours being good for the company is not a new one. The sad reality is the increasing complexity and speed of modern-day business simply prohibits sustained success in this way. To address these newer issues, many organizations have turned to a new breed of Business Intelligence (BI) products built specifically for a Finance-centric need. The focus of these tools is to help drive insight into critical decision-making. Some of them offer an exceptional collection of features that can empower new insight throughout the organization. The goal is empowering each layer of the organization with the key metrics they need to excel in their area.