The range of data available to business continues to expand. There is already a lot of data captured by diverse process owners across the business. Developments in Big Data and Data Analytics provide opportunities to access and assess further sources of data which may have potential to better inform decision-making and performance management.
This CGMA report outlines how best practice in decision making is shifting towards an insight-driven process based on the rational interpretation and understanding of data. It sets out the kind of questions that can be addressed by analytics initiatives and looks at how working with data both to gain insight and to support decision making is a challenging process.
"We held a recent roundtable of CFOs of US public companies and found that “adding insight to the numbers” was in the top three issues they felt were most urgent. They cited competition and business model shifts as the drivers for data-driven analytics across their business units and the need for their management accountants to play a lead role in these efforts."
Tom Hood, CPA, CITP, CGMA
Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute