IBM: On Smarter Financial Decisions and Analytics

 Mr David Parmenter and Patrizio Calitri

It is a complex and difficult world to actually tackle yet it is VERY essential to a company's operations. Now that the country is bullish and the economy has got recent upgrades from financial entities, it is time to take care of it and analyze risks - whilst doing the legwork on future-perfect goals for your brand.

The Chief Financial Officer is now more than ever important to hone the landscape of the Philippine organizations and the economy. Each corp's capability to adapt and plan ahead sparks so many opportunities to earn and learn. We were invited a few days ago over lunch and a media briefing about the IBM Finance Forum where kiwi based best selling author and consultant David Parmenter and IBM's own Business Unit Executive Patrizio Calitri talked about key performance indexes and how to make smarter financial decisions through the application of analytics.

IBM Smarter Analytics offer several solutions that can help manage events, gather insights so you can outperform the competition. Managers these days somehow have common functions as CFO's and if you think about it they are naturally the end persons to implement whatever the executive decides upon. IBM Analytics was designed to increase collaborations and simply make such system work with each other faster and easier. It follows 3 particular elements namely time, control and confidence so it could add value in an organization. It might look too simple but if you perfect these functions well upon first salvo then you'll have better chances to achieve the goal of making your whole organization work together. This was one of the points raised by Patrizio Calitri early on who's not new to IBM's business analytics.  

Having your people work with these tools would make them consolidate elements of your corporation very quickly. It's one of the ways how technology is used at an advantage to create a more adaptive way of planning which is important to any entity. In exemplar, we probably are used to having all our plans set for the fiscal year when budgets are planned and given a set amount of things that you plan to do the whole duration. The things is, these things change and if you do not have it on your plans then you'll end up like a duck with its head chopped off. Pardon the comparison but I have seen this happen to the biggest corporations. If you implement something set on a fiscal year, you'll be on constraints with money, manpower and you wouldn't be able to delegate it on other entities in your structure because they probably have the same allotted limitations. Corporations should try and practice "adapting"; like making a quarterly or monthly plan that can change with the time. In this sense, you would easily make headway automating processes, increase your organizations agility if change is needed and make it better for everyone to gain new insight. You need this to simply plan ahead for your business. It is important to achieve analytical insight so you can paint the whole picture. Having something like performance narrative gives a clear structure to the organization and this way you can gain consensus on a plan and execute. This goes the same with your on going reports and analysis since it applies to that as well.The process entails gathering of financial and performance data of your manpower, having the right disclosures, the capability to review, edit, approve and certify, so you can easily publish the data to shareholders and regulators alike. Admittedly we spend close to 77% of our operations in manual preparation of reports so making errors are quite expected. IBM Analytics knows how to handle this and make you start to reduce risks of error via automation through software, minimize insider leaks and eliminate late filings of reports.

They use IBM Cognos TM1 Software which can produce on-demand enterprise planning software for budgeting, forecasting and data analysis. They can design this to work in various ways that would be applicable for you and your business. IBM makes sure your analytics goes personal because this tool is configurable. It's capability to adapt to the set data and have it produce customized results would make your business better understand the things to analyze. You'll have the power to produce rapid development and deployment of flexible products, including profitability data essential for your business' growth. It's so cool to have IBM share this opportunities to the Philippines; congratulations on your 75th year of operations in our country!

David Parmenter dubbed as the "King of KPI's" also discussed a bit about how important it is to measure, monitor and change performance. He also dispels myths about having these numbers depict performance related bonuses and in turn have people do well at work. There is no truth that this apparently works and there are certain flaws in this methodology. We've seen this happen most of the time in our own backyards and yet to find something that would exactly work for our businesses in general. KPI's should be measured 24/7 he laments and should be non financial in nature. It was so astounding to have a great mind tell that particular fact because I felt we were doing these things at work now. There should probably be a change in culture and how we do things to measure this. We would love to expound on this soon. You can take a look at his great work over at http://davidparmenter.com and it'll change the way you see these numbers. It made me realize a couple of things and I'd probably implement one or more changes for the people I manage where I work. It was a pleasure meeting someone so gifted as he is. We definitely learned a lot and we'll have this information utilized in IBM's goal of a smarter Philippines and a smarter planet!

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