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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Simplify Computing: IBM PureSystems

Mr. Scott Firth, Director for Systems Software Marketing and IBM Virtualization shows the next era of IT through IBM PureSystems.

Last night while I was writing this article I was thinking of something complicated to press on the keyboard because this was a pretty technical discussion. I guess I was missing the point right from the beginning; because in a nutshell IBM is making things simpler. 

Running any IT infrastructure would require a lot of resources. Software, hardware components plus virtual storage through clouds and other media. This entails a lot of money and corporations; no matter how big or small they are, need all the help they can get. IBM knows this and they are rolling out a new, simpler era of computing via their new "expert integrated systems" which would make life easier for you and me. This would integrate all IT elements, both physical and virtual. This is a new enterprise computing model which would simplify and minimize resources needed to set up and maintain whilst running your businesses. 70 percent or more of budget allowances go to this particular function. Imagine how much that would cost in a larger scale. This is where IBM PureSystems come in.

Karl Wee Lead of Strategic Business IBM Asean Software Group, Scott Firth Director for Systems Software Marketing and IBM Virtualization and Sang Yoong Yi Country Manager for IBM Systems and Technology Group answering questions from the press.

IBM invested around $2 Billion for R&D and acquisitions over four years in order to achieve this feat. Imagine a world where key functions no longer need to be done over and over again. It is possible now by merely simplifying these processes with actual software that contains these things; in which some are free and some can be purchased much like an in house "conceptual app store" for IBM. You can literally make things work in minutes, often out of the box.

The new PureSystems family boasts of three advances in managing IT infrastructures.

“Scale-In” System Design: With PureSystems, IBM is introducing a new concept in system design that integrates the server, storage, and networking into a highly automated, simple-to-manage machine. Scale-in design provides for increased density – PureSystems can handle twice as many applications compared to some IBM systems, doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space.

Patterns of Expertise: For the first time, IBM is embedding technology and industry expertise through first-of-a-kind software that allows the systems to automatically handle basic, time-consuming tasks such as configuration, upgrades, and application requirements.

Cloud Ready integration: Out of the box, all PureSystems family members are built for the cloud, enabling corporations to quickly create private, self-service cloud offerings that can scale up and down automatically.

This has in effect changed a lot in the computing landscape. With its thrust also touching on cloud technology and using that platform to generally also simplify processes, this would be something that ordinary people can actually use to maintain resources. Later on, they could make data accessible to any place and have it with the right amount of security too. When asked about other vendors selling hardware/software components similar to PureSystems, Scott Firth and Karl Wee affirms IBM is different because they have a more wholistic package. It's a tougher cookie to bite these days but the selling point is indeed the convenience in setting it up and maintaining it with a single press of a button using the right software/applications. In the long run, this is pretty good investment and can save enterprise/corporations millions of dollars.

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IBM's Business Analytics & Risk Management Solutions for a Smarter Planet

Industry Solutions Leader for the IBM ASEAN Software Group Praveen Thakur discusses Risk Management and the changing roles of CFO's.

Research and development, database management, information security, consolidation, business analytics, organization and optimization are some of the things a corporation should take very seriously. Information for a corporation is vital and IBM knows this. It can actually make or break success... and scientifically predict its future; it all should be precise and complete. I also do this for a living (yes I do have a day job); and part of the tedious reports I do is manually crunching numbers, generating them 7 different ways in 7 different languages (imagine spreadsheets, multiple tabs). Yes, it is tedious; but VERY necessary... otherwise, there wouldn't be any data to support bigger decisions in operating projects.

Charles Manuel Business Unit Executive of the Business Analytics Division - IBM ASEAN Software Group mentions how important Analytics is in an organization. Ms. Noona (right) explains how the acquisition of COGNOS made remarkable advancements in providing solutions through IBM.


It was nice to see people from the IBM Finance Forum last May 20, 2011. I knew my reports were hard but believed there was a way to automate things of this scale. Charles Manuel Business Unit Executive of the Business Analytics Division - IBM ASEAN Software Group explained the importance of tools used for "Business Analytics and Optimization". It's a holistic approach to integration of large/small scale enterprise data. Their solution is a combination of software, systems, services and research which standardizes business processes and automates generation of information needed to utilize pre-existing and valued information. It also clears out redundancies and inconsistencies found in most stored data silos and only keeps those which are important; saving a lot on resources. He also mentioned the importance of knowing that brands change in real time. Corporations must know how to do it with tools that would be able to manage risks, generate metrics and support forecasting because there should always be a deeper analysis of trends and patterns from previous months/years. Together with COGNOS, SPSS, OpenPages and Clarity Systems they would be able to support the infrastructure and software requirements of enterprise scaled businesses in the ASEAN; one emerging market.


Industry Solutions Leader for the IBM ASEAN Software Group Praveen Thakur discussed ways how we can use Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Platform to Improve Risk and Compliance Initiatives. This particular subject touched on how to manage large data and social media's effects on information explosion. Risk reduction and management costs should be an integral part of any organization. There ought to be a fail safe process and a "way" to use these large chunk of data to the advantage of the business. IBM can work with corporations for analysis of structured and unstructured information but still stay cost effective. This will be one of their main thrusts until 2015. Mr. Thakur also mentioned the changing roles of CFO's in organizations. They are no longer just the plain auditing department and become one of the integral parts of the organization and its operations. IBM's line of Software, Hardware and services for integration are standardized and can cut costs by limiting redundancy, preventing risks and determining trends that would greatly affect the business. OpenPages of IBM can make consolidating risk management practices a cinch!

For the best advise you need about these subjects, you know where to turn to. After all, 100 years experience in the industry might be the best convincing factor in their resume right?!

Kapish!?

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