Analytics
Companies have access to unprecedented levels of data captured by:
- enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
- customer relationship management (CRM) applications
- point of sale scanners
- loyalty cards
- business conducted over the internet.
Finance/business partners don’t need technical analytical and modelling skills to analyse this data. But they do need to combine an understanding of this analysis with their knowledge of the underlying data and the business, so that they can communicate financial insights and encourage evidence-based decision making.
The CIMA executive report, Improving decision making in organisations: the opportunity to transform finance (PDF 1.03MKB), provides some interesting case studies on this topic.
Data warehousing: its role in improved organisational decision making (PDF 269KB) highlights the added value data warehousing can give companies by maximising business intelligence and contributing to a strategic enterprise management (SEM) approach to business management.
More information on this topic can also be found in further reading (PDF 56KB).
