Last week started out badly in Boston when two terrorists exploded two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding over 170 more (another was killed in the pursuit that followed). Just three days later the combined law enforcement teams of the FBI, state, and local police had identified the suspects out of the tens of thousands of people in the blast area and were well on their way to tracking them down. By the next day they had killed one terrorist and apprehended the other. Credit part of the astonishing speed of this success to crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, as defined by Wikipedia, is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people. Crowdsourcing is often used by entrepreneurs to raise capital, $2.7 billion (an 81% increase) in 2012 through more than 1 million crowdsourcing campaigns last year.

When law enforcement in Boston put out the word through the media and Internet that they wanted any pictures and videos anyone had taken, especially along the last mile of the Marathon route no matter how insignificant it might seem, they were deluged. Everyone had shots of family or friends approaching the finish line, the backgrounds filled with images of other parts of the crowd. While the Boston Marathon crowdsourcing story is fascinating, it also holds important lessons for CFOs and other managers about this powerful tool. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

When Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf Group, suggests the CFO as Captain Chaos he is recognizing that someone has to take charge of the chaos increasingly surrounding us. He wrote recently in his blog that CFOs must learn to harness chaos for a very simple reason: business is becoming more chaotic.

The evidence is everywhere. Hurricanes, hybrid superstorms, earthquake-tsunami combinations, extreme heat, heavy snow in April are just a few signs. Others can be seen in the proliferation of smartphones and BYOD or the deluge of data under the banner of big data or the proliferation of myriad security threats. Even a shortage of sufficient energy can lead to chaos. Think of it this way: chaos has become the new normal.

Can the CFO step up as the new superhero able to overcome whatever chaos to deliver the right value at the right time and guide the organization through today’s tumultuous business environment? Sure, and Berridge offers four steps to get you going. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

Research leader Gartner reports the price optimization market is poised to rebound. Driving the rebound is mounting interest among enterprises for improving margins and revenue, increasing responsiveness to market volatility, and extracting greater efficiencies and impact from pricing activities within sales and marketing processes.

Described as a niche market, Gartner estimates that through 2014 investments in price optimization and management software will help increase gross margins, on average, by more than 2%. With management in many organizations grateful to increase margins by even fractional amounts Gartner’s estimate should be quite appealing.

The market is dominated by four vendors; PROS, Vendavo, Vistaar Technologies and Zilliant. In 2008, for example, Zilliant decided to shift from on-premise licensed software to a SaaS model deployed via the cloud. That allowed it to reduce price points and simplify deployment. “That changed the dynamics of the market,” says Greg Peters, Zilliant CEO. It changed the entire economics of price optimization (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

Have you found the missing metric? As CFO you probably feel you have all the metrics you need and more but one is missing.

For Google Analytics, the missing metric is $ Index, described as the fastest way to figure out how each of your web pages contributes to your total revenue. It takes your total revenue, analyzes the pages that visitors went through before they converted, and weights them so you can see which ones are the most valuable. For sure that is a valuable metric for your CMO but that’s not the missing metric wiredFINANCE is talking about.

Especially if you are a manufacturer there is a more important metric, profit velocity. As Profit Velocity Solutions explains: All manufacturers worldwide carefully measure and manage the profit per unit of their products, but very few manufacturers have any idea how much profit per hour their equipment produces. That is why it’s called the missing metric; until recently, there simply hasn’t been a tool capable of measuring it. But now there is. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

A recent study by ADP found that 81% of finance executives felt compliance was getting more complex. ADP conducted the survey in collaboration with CFO Research showing 89% of senior finance executives rank compliance as a priority, but 73% expect the complexity of new regulations to make it ever more resource-intensive to comply over the next two years.

So how did the senior execs react to the news? Despite increasing complexity, ADP reports nearly 60% of survey respondents said their compliance budget would remain stagnant or decrease in the next two years. So, they expect more and harder work but aren’t increasing the resources to do the job.

The execs apparently believe that some magical efficiency gain will occur despite 60% of the companies reporting that they incurred compliance-related penalties with some regularity. Apparently these senior finance execs would rather pay penalties than increase compliance resources. As CFO, what would you do? Here is what ADP found. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

Organizations everywhere are beginning to move pieces of their IT capabilities into the cloud. Just don’t forget to bring a cloud management platform (CMP) with you. Although the cloud management platform (CMP) market is in its infancy you still want one advises Gartner in its Cloud Management Platforms, 2013 report.

In a different Gartner report, Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, the researcher notes: As enterprises deploy private clouds, interest in managing them is rising. Innovative CMP vendors—what Gartner dubs Cool Vendors—can help manage infrastructure resources to deliver service quality, security, and availability for workloads running in cloud environments.

“The benefits become obvious as enterprises start to deploy serious business workloads in the cloud, and these benefits all address bottom line concerns,” says Steven Henning, , CMO, ServiceMesh. The benefits revolve around grabbing new market opportunities fast and accelerating the introduction of new business capabilities that bring in customers and revenue. ServiceMesh is one of the four cool CMP vendors named in Gartner’s report along with Cloupia, Eucalyptus, and Nimbula. So, what should you look for in your CMP platform. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

Big data is fueling exploding interest in the business intelligence (BI) segment of the software market. BI is what managers have long used to make information-based decisions. With big0 data BI vendors now are incorporating more and various analytics—software that filters and correlates the data to uncover insights that might otherwise be missed—into their latest BI products.

This led the research firm Gartner to change how it categorizes BI products. Specifically, Gartner changed the name of its BI Magic Quadrant report to Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms to reflect the growing importance of analysis capabilities in the information systems organizations are now deploying. You can find this new Gartner Magic Quadrant on BI and Analytics here.

Driven in part by the explosion of interest in big data, Gartner notes the business intelligence market (including data warehouses and CRM analytics) is growing nine percent per year. While it was worth $57 billion at the end of 2010, the category will surge to $81 billion by 2014 and as high as $136 billion by 2020 and keep evolving as it grows. So what should you look for in a BI product. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

A few weeks ago wiredFINANCE wrote about research around the coming talent wars and the critical role of IT. There is a transition underway to increasingly connected economies, and companies that succeed going forward will be those that can attract and retain the next generation of talent. Now you can meet some of that talent.

IBM recently released a companion study to its CEO study, called Connected Generation: Perspectives from tomorrow’s leaders in a digital world—Insights from the 2012 IBM Global Student Study. You can download the report here. In that study, IBM surveyed 3,400 college and university students worldwide compared their responses to those of CEOs in its global CEO study. You can find the latest CEO study here.

In the comparison, for instance, we learn that students share three of the top four concerns of CEOs. Where they differ is when it comes to people skills, which CEOs rank second to technology factors. Students placed people skills far down the list. Other findings may surprise you. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

Cloud computing clearly is gaining traction. A September study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), reported on here, found that organizations are embracing the cloud at a 15% faster rate than previously forecast.

Of course, you expect members of a leading technology group like ODCA to be early adopters. In its utterly unscientific way, wiredFINANCE expects almost every business to deploy some cloud capabilities in the next few years. From a business standpoint, it just makes so much sense. This blog made the case in October, here.

Meanwhile, the ODCA study found companies are adopting the public cloud for a variety of uses. ERP, HR, finance, and sales and marketing are driving the broadest cloud adoption. Whatever your interest in cloud computing IDC identifies five questions you should ask that sets the stage for any cloud deployment. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog

PwC is bullish on mobile, projecting a 35% CAGR through 2015, driven in large part by solid state disk (SSD) technology. The PwC researchers now see it extending beyond mobile to other types of computing.

Deloitte takes SSD enthusiasm even further: By the end of 2012, SSD will likely store data in 90% of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, MP3 players), up from just 20% in 2006, the consulting firm predicts. More surprising, Deloitte expects up to 15% of laptops and netbooks to rely on SSDs, four times more than in 2010. Even in the enterprise data center, SSDs could rise to 10%.

The growing penetration of SSD into businesses presents an opportunity to rein in ongoing storage costs while boosting business performance. The advantages of SSD for performance-hungry applications more than compensate for the higher cost. (more…)

Source: Big Fat Finance Blog