Excellence in leadership October 2012

Excellence in Leadership

Issue 3 | 2012 | ÂŁ12

Simon Jeffery, head of finance at Siem Car Carriers, on how technology drives performance Katrina Nurse, FD at Topshop/Topman, on the skills required for a successful finance career

Excellence in Leadership

John Brougham, CFO at Monitise, on the technology challenges facing his business Julius van der Laar, new media guru, on what business can learn from Barack Obama Darren Tierney, CFO at Directski.com, on making the most of business intelligence technology

TECHNO LO GY THE

Technology

ISSUE

Strategies for gaining a competitive advantage from the ongoing technological revolution

ISSUE 3 2012

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

FOREWORD

Cover illustration: Arunas Kacinskas. This page: Illustration: Masao Yamazaki/Dutch Uncle

I

Technology

n terms of technology, modern business is rather like Integrated corporate reporting has evolved in leaps and the Olympics: there is a constant race to find who can bounds over recent years. Chris Field, business consulting most effectively utilise the strength of their data to manager of technology provider Infor, argues that get the best results. It is widely believed that the modern reporting methods are shaping technological global volume of business data doubles every 1.2 developments in terms of meeting the demand for greater years. But while some companies are riding the data speed, detail and accuracy (p48). However, some firms wave, others are sinking into an information mire. are still lagging behind. Chris looks at the pros and cons of In this issue we look at the technological trends moving to XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting emerging from the business world and talk to some of the Language) to achieve a faster and easier exchange of finance leaders who are going for gold in the IT marathon. information across organisations.

Just as the microscope revolutionised the way biologists As business technology becomes increasingly could see inside cells, today’s communications and powerful, the European Commission is planning to information technology provides a game-changing view of impose tougher controls to keep security breaches in what is happening inside the body of a business. With this check. The proposed revisions to the Data Protection in mind, we talk to three finance professionals working at Directive aim to give EU citizens greater control over the cutting edge of new technology to find out how they are their personal data. But some fear that a new obligation benefiting from the use of social on public and private sector media, cloud computing and organisations to report data ‘I very much hope that this issue breaches within 24 hours is too real-time insights (p8). will provide the motivation to A survey by the Economist much of a tough call. We talk to Intelligence Unit found that more tackle the challenging arena of AT&T, Facebook and other industry than half of the executives technology with Olympian vigour’ experts about the feasibility of this approached were concerned about new approach (p44). making poor choices because of It goes without saying that the inaccurate or incomplete data. CIMA technical specialist finance function plays a key role in supporting the Peter Simons discusses how business intelligence (BI) can effective utilisation of new technology. Julie Evans, head help transform the finance function – and why management of technology for Singapore at Barclays, uses her own accountants are ideally positioned to unlock this value (p24). experiences to highlight how effective a close working To provide some examples of how much of an impact relationship between the IT and finance functions can be BI can make, business journalist Tim Cooper looks at how in adding value across the organisation (p43). one e-company has turned around a loss-making acquisition Just as the Olympics have inspired so many of us to through enhanced BI modelling (p20). Tim also discusses strive for greater levels of fitness, I very much hope that where BI will go next as organisations grapple with the this issue will provide the motivation to tackle the challenge of turning the results of their analysis into new challenging arena of technology with Olympian vigour. business processes.

Going one step further, we move into the world of big data. Steve O’Neill, CFO (EMEA-north) at cloud computing Charles Tilley, experts EMC, discusses how mass data analysis can lead chief executive, organisations to some important answers in terms of their CIMA competitive advantage, potential for innovation and ability to exploit new market opportunities (p34). Meanwhile, Eddie Short, head of business intelligence at KPMG, believes there may be benefits in watching and waiting before taking on the big data challenge (p37).

Excellence in Leadership is the official publication of CIMAplus. For more information visit: www.cimaglobal.com/cimaplus

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

CONTENTS

Data concerns The technology challenges on CFOs’ minds p8 3 Foreword 6 Vital statistics 8 Talking technology Lucy Greggains, CFO of video advertising company Unruly Media, John Brougham, CFO of mobile-money firm Monitise, and Jim Muir, FD at financial management firm AutoRek discuss the technological issues facing their organisations 14 The digital revolution Why businesses’ products are about to change for ever 17 New media strategies What business can learn from presidential election campaigns 18 Under pressure Ethics: a new CIMA report highlights concerns around workplace pressure

Intelligent thinking Taking advantage of customer data to improve your business p20 20 Business intelligence How business intelligence technologies are powering companies to dramatic bottom-line improvements 24 Maximising intelligence A CGMA report urges management accountants to put themselves at the forefront of driving business intelligence in their organisations 26 Your view Simon Jeffery, head of finance at Siem Car Carriers, explains how technology has benefited his organisation 30 Fast track to leadership A group of CFOs and other finance leaders discuss the skills required to be a modern-day finance leader

Depth chargers Mining the masses of customer data – in a safe and efficient manner p34

34 Big data Steve O’Neill, CFO of EMEA-North at EMC, says the age of “big data” is an opportunity for CFOs and finance departments to drive growth by identifying trends and reacting quickly to the information they hold internally; while KPMG’s Eddie Short urges companies to tread carefully

data breaches within 24 hours of them occurring. Few are convinced that it is practicable

41 Get involved with CIMA

52 Skills shift Three finance leaders discuss the skills needed to fulfil the finance function of the future

43 Mutual respect Julie Evans, head of technology, Singapore, at Barclays, explains the value of a strong partnership with finance 44 Cyber concerns The European Commission wants organisations to report

48 Modern-day reporting How modern-day corporate reporting is driving developments in technology 50 Finance growth The benefits of salary benchmarking in today’s job market

56 Malaysia’s moment Why Malaysia is becoming a shared-service location of choice 65 Next issue 66 CIMA directory

Editorial advisory board Malinga Arsakularatne chief financial officer, Hemas Holdings

Bogi Nils Bogason chief financial officer, Icelandair Group

George Riding chief financial officer, Middle East and north Africa, SAP

Jeff van der Eems chief financial officer, United Biscuits

David Blackwood group finance director, Yule Catto & Co

Kai Peters chief executive, Ashridge Business School

Arul Sivagananathan managing director, Hayleys BSI

Jennice Zhu finance director, Unilever China

6 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

VITAL STATISTICS Organisations’ utilisation of cloud computing technology:

Talking technical The Financial Times Bowen Craggs Index produces an annual ranking of the world’s top companies’ corporate websites, mobile sites and social media channels, as well as a ranking for serving corporate social responsibility audiences online:

23%

2010

Communication channels: RANK 2012

1 2 2 2 5 5 5 5 9 9

COMPANY

2012 SCORE

2011 SCORE

ROYAL DUTCH SHELL ENI SANOFI VODAFONE BP BRITISH AMERICAN TOBACCO RIO TINTO UNILEVER ASTRAZENECA BARCLAYS

29 27 27 27 26 26 26 26 25 25

28 27 27 26 26 25 26 25 24 26

DIFFERENCE +1 0 0 +1 0 +1 0 +1 +1 -1

CSR audiences: RANK 2012

1 1 1 4 4 4 7 7 7 7

COMPANY

2012 SCORE

2011 SCORE

DIFFERENCE

27 27 27 26 26 26 25 25 25 25

28 25 26 NEW 26 26 26 24 26 24

-1 +2 +1 NEW 0 0 -1 +1 -1 -1

15%

55% 36%

2011 9% 40%

15%

Yes, currently in use Yes, under evaluation No, but planned in the next year No, and no plans to use in the next year

Source: GISS 2010 and GISS 2011

Has managing IT risk become more challenging over the past year?

3%

BP BRITISH AMERICAN TOBACCO ROYAL DUTCH SHELL BASF COCA-COLA TOTAL CHEVRON CISCO SYSTEMS HEWLETT-PACKARD PEPSICO

7%

18%

12% 48%

CIMA is the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants 26 Chapter Street, London SW1P 4NP 020 7663 5441 www.cimaglobal.com CIMA contact: CPD manager Claire Morton Email: claire.morton @cimaglobal.com Excellence in Leadership is published for CIMA by Seven, 3-7 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5EJ. Tel: 020 7775 7775.

Group editor Jon Watkins Group art director Simon Campbell Junior designer Josh Farley Senior sub editors Graeme Allen Darren Barrett Deputy chief sub Christina Ryder Chief sub editor Steve McCubbin Picture editor Louise Fenerci Picture researcher Alex Ridley Editorial director Peter Dean Managing director Jessica Gibson Creative director Michael Booth Production manager Mike Doukanaris Group publishing director Rachael Stilwell Commercial account development Hilton Young Advertising manager Andrew Walker Email: andrew.walker@ seven.co.uk Tel: 020 7775 5717 Chief executive Sean King Chairman Tim Trotter © Seven © CIMA Cover artwork Gallery Stock

19%

Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly disagree

Source: Ernst & Young

Source: Bowen Craggs & Co The products and service advertised in Excellence in Leadership are not necessarily endorsed by or connected in any way with CIMA. The editorial opinions expressed in the publication are those of the individual authors and not necessarily those of CIMA or Seven. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information in this publication, neither Seven nor CIMA accepts responsibility for errors or omissions.

The contents of this publication are subject to worldwide copyright protection and reproduction in whole or in part, whether mechanical or electronic, is expressly forbidden without the prior written consent of CIMA/Seven. All rights reserved.

Origination by Rhapsody.

Printed in the UK by Wyndeham Press Group.

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New directions in technology

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

What technology challenges, risks and issues are on the agenda for global finance professionals?

Lucy Greggains, CFO of video advertising company Unruly Media, John Brougham, CFO of mobile-money firm Monitise, and Jim Muir, FD at financial management firm AutoRek, share their views

Getty Images

From your perspective as CFO, what are the biggest technology issues facing your organisation right now?

Greggains: Unruly Media has experienced phenomenal growth since inception. We closed a $25m Series A funding round in January this year and have grown from 24 people in fiscal 2011 to 122 to date. We are lucky in that many of our employees have a deep understanding of technology so we probably experience fewer IT growing pains than you’d expect with such hyper growth. The biggest challenge for us is getting the opportunity to test equipment without having to spend money first.

Brougham: Delivery of communications and access to information has to be timely so that we can operate quickly and efficiently. This is crucial in a fast-growing business like ours, which has operations across four continents, dealing with an “always on” industry such as mobile. The mobile technology space is growing at an exponential pace and it is important that our technology reflects this. We are always

under pressure to find innovative ways of using technology.

Muir: The biggest concern I have as a financial director is the quality of sales predictability. Our challenges tend to be less about the technical excellence of the software we use and more about how we support our sales and marketing, and how we budget for and target specific propositions to specific market segments.

We are constantly refreshing our revenuegenerating capability by diversifying our client set and proposition range – but the forecast-ability of returns (especially in a recession) is a challenge. Buying cycles do seem to be stretching. Consistency of CRM, project-buying cycle information and financial records is a recurring challenge for all businesses.

To what extent do you and your department use social media applications?

Greggains: Unruly Media exists to distribute, track and share Fortune and

FTSE 100 clients’ videos across the social web. So, essentially, we are founded on the principles of social media. We have a very open social media policy with our staff and we hire people who understand and actively use Twitter, Facebook and so on.

That said, we do make sure our staff are trained on our social media “do’s and don’ts” in their induction in order to retain Unruly’s unique tone of voice as we expand.

Brougham: The use of social media applications is more limited in finance.

However, social media is used widely by our staff in the UK, US and around the rest of the world to monitor significant trends in our market space and keep up with the evolution of consumer behaviours that are relevant to our line of business.

Muir: We use social media extensively, both internally and externally. I think we have an excellent presence as a business and that’s down to the collective efforts of all the people in the company. Social media »

10 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

‘It’s part of our company’s ethos to embrace cloud’ Lucy Greggains Greggains joined Unruly as CFO in April 2012. She has more than 12 years of experience in finance roles in the media industry, in public and private UK and US companies, including BSkyB, EMAP and, most recently, Shine Group.

is reducing our business acquisition and recruitment costs. It is also an important tool to help us educate our clients and users about the latest issues affecting financial reporting and data automation.

We recently invested in a new website and we’re using this as an employee engagement tool to replace a lot of the internal communications on our intranet.

We feel our staff should be seeing the same messages as our clients.

By 2013 accounting and payroll are predicted to represent the largest chunk of IT applications supported in the cloud. To what extent have you embraced cloud-based computing?

Greggains: Unruly’s own technology platform MEME (Media Engagement and Measurement Engine) is largely cloudbased, so it’s part of our company’s ethos to embrace the cloud in our everyday work. For example, we’re an avid user of Salesforce, one of the pioneers of cloud computing.

Brougham: From an internal operations perspective, cloud-based computing is definitely an area that we are paying

close attention to. It has clear benefits, especially for businesses which are global and mobile. We have already moved to a cloud-based payroll system, for instance. Cloud-based computing is also a significant area for our own R&D and product development efforts where, due to the ‘Software as a Service’ nature of our products, we see opportunities to increase operational efficiency and lower our overall development costs.

Muir: We have added cloud to our proposition set (in response to demand from BPO and government clients in particular) and are actively exploring other cloud opportunities. We have outsourced payroll and I’d expect our provider to be examining more efficient and effective delivery mechanisms, including cloud. A significant element of our HR support is also outsourced to Mentor (RBS).

We still have some reticence about commercially sensitive applications (most notably CRM) moving off the internal infrastructure, though – and

I can’t see our position changing on that for some time. Although organisations are increasingly looking to move to Software as a Service to reduce IT costs, the change has been gradual rather than seismic for both ourselves and our clients.

Tell us about the relationship between the finance department and the IT department. How do you navigate this and decide whether or not to pursue a major IT project?

Greggains: We have a very close relationship with our IT department.

We can be very flexible in implementing new, small IT projects which a larger organisation would need a lot of time to get signed off.

Brougham: Given that we are a global mobile technology business that counts prestigious financial institutions and payments processors as clients, there is a very close relationship between our technology and finance departments. Being able to manage risks and quantify both the costs and »

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

‘Real-time insights are increasingly important’ John Brougham Brougham joined the executive team at Monitise in April 2010 as CFO after serving as a non-executive director for the company.

Brougham was previously finance director of BT Transformation, a role which focused on accelerating BT’s transformation into a networked IT services company. He also worked for six years as CFO of BT Global Services, which served BT’s large corporate customers and ran all the group’s activities outside the UK.

ROI of our IT projects in a tangible way is critical and that requires close collaboration between finance and IT. Muir: We specialise in financial management software, so the two functions are necessarily close and interested in each other! We don’t have major IT projects per se: our preference is to buy best-of-breed (CRM and accounting tools being the most obvious recent developments). I can’t see that philosophy changing in the short to medium term as we feel our people are better engaged in revenue-generation activity.

How mobile are you and your team?

How do you allow your budget managers to make informed decisions about spending when out of the office?

Greggains: Our finance team is based in our headquarters in London and services nine offices across the globe, from Australia to the West Coast of America, so we really operate across a 36-hour day!

We also work with 14,000 bloggers and

publishers across the globe and we need to make sure they are paid on time. However, the managing director in each of the offices has responsibility for their own P&L, so they are empowered to make their own purchasing decisions outside of our London headquarters.

Brougham: To reflect the fact that we are a global mobile money company, we have created processes that allow managers to make decisions while they are on the move. Our organisation is fairly flat in terms of its structure and we have paid a lot of attention to making sure that any bottlenecks in any decision-making processes are at an absolute minimum.

Muir: We are by definition a mobile business. We consult with many of the world’s largest organisations and most of the UK’s financial services communities.

Our clients expect us to be on site either on delivery or account management and, as such, it’s an important part of our spend, albeit much of it recoverable.

What are the next big innovations that will change how the finance team will support the business, and how are you preparing for that change?

Greggains: As Unruly continues its strategy of global expansion, we need to make sure that we have systems in place and flexibility within the team to support each of our international offices. We may look at recruiting local finance support in some of these offices in the near future, but right now we are busy ensuring processes work across all territories.

However, I’m acutely aware that I work in a creative industry and by no means do I wish to stifle that creativity by implementing processes for processes’ sake that don’t add business value.

Brougham: Real-time insights are becoming increasingly important. We are fortunate enough to have a very wide array of skills in our business drawn from graduates, entrepreneurs and seasoned business professionals who all have

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

‘Technology spend is likely to be on front-end support’ Jim Muir Muir is finance director at AutoRek, a global provider of expert financial data management software. He is a boardlevel operator within several companies and an adviser to FTSE 100 boards within financial services.

contributions to make in helping us make more informed decisions that are based on sound metrics.

Muir: I expect that the finance team will be much more engaged in project profitability and project management support. We do have an excellent project management office that is almost joined at the hip with finance, so it’s a natural and smooth evolution.

How much of your time is spent on technology-related issues and how has this changed from a year ago?

Greggains: I’ve only been at Unruly for three months. But, one of the big benefits of working at an innovative technology company is that there are so many tech-savvy people working here. Our co-founder and CTO is a technical genius and has scaled a fantastic team of 20 engineers who allow us to consistently launch industry-first features and product enhancements. Having these people by your side is a great asset.

Brougham: We service more than 300 financial institutions and partners around the world, so our business is absolutely 24/7, 365 days a year. Over the past 12 months we have seen an ever-growing appetite from our clients for innovative technology solutions that help them retain their existing customers and secure new revenue lines.

Muir: Very little from an FD perspective.

I spent some time supporting the design, implementation and testing of new accounting software last year but we bought an industry-leading package.

To what extent do you plan to increase/decrease your technology spending over the next 12 months?

What are the tech priorities for you over the next year?

Greggains: We continually invest in our own technology platform and we recently developed the world’s first Social Video Lab, which we opened in June. We are currently looking at tools that facilitate

better sharing and presentation of information between and across our offices, as we hold “meetings” with other territories on a daily basis. We are looking to invest in a new ledger system and we are continuing to scale our CRM tool, Salesforce. Those are our fixed plans at the moment, but the beauty of working at a company like Unruly is that we have the flexibility to adopt new technology as and when it makes sense for the business.

Brougham: Cloud-computing will become a bigger priority for us. We will also continue to invest in attracting highly skilled graduates, innovative developers and seasoned industry players from a wide range of backgrounds – banks, software houses and mobile businesses.

Muir: Our technology spend is likely to be on front-end support such as website development, digital media and marketing tools and possibly on some e-expenses systems assessment.

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Talking objects Technology has brought major disruption and change to the business world. However, Andy Hobsbawm, founder of software firm EVRYTHNG, says that even greater technological change is coming‌ and businesses better be ready to respond

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

Gallery Stock

T

uesday 10 August 2010 was a significant day in the digital world. It was the day when more machines than people signed up to new accounts with the two largest mobile network operators in the US, Verizon and AT&T. This refers to what’s called machine-tomachine (M2M) applications, when internet-connected objects talk to each other to do things autonomously on our behalf.

It might be washing machines that connect to a smart electricity meter to run loads when the tariff is at its cheapest, or cars that can choose the routes with the least traffic and can tell the garage when they need a service, or digital picture frames that automatically display images drawn from our library of photos in the cloud.

This is part of the much-heralded “internet of things”. This describes a world where billions of physical objects, from supply chain components and personal possessions to trains, buildings and paintings all become connected and part of the web. A world where, as tech visionary Bruce Sterling once put it: “You won’t need to hunt anxiously for your missing shoes in the morning, you’ll google them.”

Ericsson, the leading manufacturer of equipment for wireless networks, predicts that by the end of this decade there will be 50 billion such internet-connected devices – about five times as many connected machines as people.

To some extent, we’re already living in a world of connected physical things – even if we don’t realise it.

Embedded chips, tags and sensors already meticulously quality check our food, sort our luggage at airports and let us swipe our way around public transportation systems. The same embedded tech monitors our air for pollution, our water pipes for leaks and our bridges for structural damage.

But while a lot may be starting to happen behind the scenes, it doesn’t seem to have shown up in our homes or on our high streets. Until now.

PEOPLE + THINGS

A direct connection between real-world things and people has begun to happen.

For instance, Toyota Friend, which launched last year, is a plug-in hybrid car that communicates with its owner by email or text when the engine needs to be recharged or the tyres changed (these alerts can be set to automatically update the owner’s social networks).

Sports equipment manufacturer Nike has attracted more than five million users to its Nike+ service, which enables athletes to connect their trainers to the web and compare their performance data with a running community. Where Nike blazed a trail, others will follow. The principle that products are inherently more useful and desirable when they come wrapped in a socially connected layer of digital services can be applied across all categories.

Connecting our products to the internet like this will fundamentally change our understanding of what a physical product is and does by turning it into a channel for personalised interactive experiences and real-time communications. Digitally augmented products will come to dominate the marketplace, forever changing the relationship between manufacturer and consumer.

MAKING PRODUCTS SMART

It’s time for products to catch up and get connected. It’s time for inanimate things to get online so we can access the kind of real-time, social web experiences we’ve come to expect in our daily lives. It’s time for our physical products to be as clever as Google, as immediate as Twitter, as easy as Apple, as informative as Wikipedia, as social as Facebook, as personal as Amazon and as entertaining as YouTube.

The real game-changer has been smartphones. Today’s smart mobile devices have more processing power than the computers that launched the first Apollo space missions, have become our remote control for the world and represent a revolution in consumer interaction. And, among many other things, a smartphone functions as a hand-held, digital sensor for the physical world. Meaning our phones provide a web-connected interface that can breathe connected, intelligent life into any inanimate object.

For instance, in South Korea commuters can shop at Tesco’s “virtual stores” on subway platforms by scanning a simple 2D bar code (a Quick Response [QR] code) to order products for home delivery that same evening. Increasingly, products will ship with these kinds of simple “smart tags”. When you buy products like these, your first action will be to “check in” to it with your smartphone, taking digital possession of it as well as physical, and enabling the manufacturer, or retailer, to trigger a new world of digital content, services, and apps personalised to the individual product and owner that expand and enhance the experience of using it.

Soon, you’ll expect your fridge to be able to tell you the cheapest place to get spare parts for it, or how to find trusted local service help if it breaks down, or perhaps eventually offer you sustainable end-of-life solutions, such as posting it to a local Freecycle community. You’ll wonder why a Vuitton bag can’t verify its own authenticity so you can be sure it’s not a fake. And if you want to sell your mountain bike, you’ll expect your bike to know how much it’s worth on eBay right now and let you sell it with a digital locker full of service history, warranty and receipts, not to mention photos and route maps of amazing rides you’ve enjoyed with it.

And remember, there are now more active phone connections than people on the planet. »

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

A FACEBOOK FOR THINGS™

All this can now be done, crucially, without the need for manufacturers to expensively re-engineer the products themselves.

A unique tag can be added to the product label – this could be as simple as a QR code or more advanced NFC tag (the tech in London Transport’s Oyster Card system) – which customers can scan or swipe with their smartphone when they “check in” to it.

This instantly activates the digital profile for that product which lives in the cloud, so the product now has an addressable identity on the web. Importantly, this is about unique identifiers for every single item, not the same code on every product that links all consumers to the same website, which is how, for instance, tags such as QR codes are currently used.

Think of A Facebook For Things™, where individual products have their own, virtual presence online, just as we have individual social network profiles that are digital representations of our physical selves. At EVRYTHNG we call this kind of object profile an Active Digital Identity™ and it allows us to attach interactive communications or apps to

a specific product (not just a Nikon D90 camera, but Andy’s Nikon D90 camera).

In effect, products become “social objects” and unlock a brand new world of digital content and service experiences.

PRODUCT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT™

From a brand point of view, once you give an individual online identity to each one of your products, powerful new marketing experiences can be created – we know that every customer is unique, now their products can be too.

A major shift towards what we call Product Relationship Management™ is imminent, and brands will increasingly be expected to provide a suite of compelling digital services around their physical products to remain competitive. This will be much more important than having an overactive Twitter page (sorry interns).

And of course there’s the analytics: brands can extract a wealth of data from and about the consumer and their interactions with their products.

Today, relationship marketing is often fairly crude, and based on a set of predetermined assumptions (a consumer once bought X so now we’ll offer them Y).

‘Connecting our products to the internet will fundamentally change our understanding of what a physical product is’ Andy Hobsbawm Andy Hobsbawm is a founder and the chief marketing officer of EVRYTHNG (@connectevrythng). EVRYTHNG is a Web of Things™ software company that makes products smart by connecting them to the web. EVRYTHNG’s technology helps brands get closer to customers by turning their physical products into a direct channel for personalised digital services, real-time communications and one-to-one relationships.

However, in a world where products are digitally connected, and where marketers understand much more about how products are actually used, we can have a much more useful and relevant type of marketing. This will, in turn, give consumers richer, more personal, and digitally augmented experiences of owning and using their product.

This will leave no product or industry unchanged – in order to access this rich cache of data and offer an engaging range of products and services to consumers, all product companies will have to think about technologies that bridge the offline and online worlds.

We’ve already seen major disruptive changes to the business landscape because of technology innovations such as social networking and the mobile app economy, but we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. The physical world becoming connected will bring even more unimagined, fascinating and profound transformations this decade. One thing’s for sure, if you thought there was a lot of communication and intelligence on the internet today, just wait until all the things start talking.

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What can we learn from Obama Julius van der Laar, new media campaigner for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, explains what businesses can learn from its success

O

Getty Images

EIL COMMENT

ver the past couple of years, a lot of organisations have looked at the successful 2008 campaign and asked themselves why it worked so well, and what they can learn from it.

Much of the success was based on the fact that we had a tremendous message.

Something that I encounter a lot of the time with companies in the private sector is that they believe a successful new media strategy is about simply launching a Facebook page, opening a Twitter account or putting share buttons on their content. Then they wonder why nobody is clicking.

What was so effective about the Obama campaign was that it had strong messages and it made effective use of storytelling.

Volunteers told the personal stories of those affected by the policies of the previous administration – why healthcare reform was so important; the personal impact of the financial collapse. It connected things that people really cared about with targeted online actions. That is something businesses must learn – that, as with any communication strategy, you must think first about the message and then about the channels for delivering it.

It is also important that businesses do not rush headlong into new media channels.

The notion that email is dead and that it’s now only about social media, for example, is wrong. Social media is incredibly important and there is so much rich content companies can put through their social media channels to bring stories to life and reach people. But at the same time, it’s difficult to connect with people. Facebook and Twitter updates get dropped in a constant news stream, whereas if you use email in a targeted and segmented way you will reach people directly, with the right content at the right moment in their lives.

Private businesses can certainly learn from the Obama campaign in terms of engaging potential customers through new media technologies.

During the campaign, we decided that the announcement of Joe Biden as the vice president pick would first be communicated through text message, to encourage people to sign up for the text service. That wasn’t just a great marketing move, the incentive of becoming the first to know allowed us to build up a huge collection of text message recipients and cellphone contacts who could be contacted later with relevant election details.

Rigorous testing is also important with new media and another thing business

can learn from political campaigns is that they put their supporters in an important position. They don’t take them for granted.

As a business you must view your email, Facebook and Twitter recipients as the most important asset you have. You must also think about the information you are sending out because these are not only your customers, they are customers who care enough about you and your products to have engaged in this way.

Treat them like the customers they are and ensure you are sending them the information you would give if you were seeing them face to face. It’s basically another form of customer service, so think about it from the point of view of the receiver.

Of course, new media strategies are different for businesses operating in different sectors and industries. In the banking sector, for example, people are unlikely to openly discuss their personal banking on their Facebook page. However, any business can make itself more available, better known and better at customer service using new media. In that sense, I can’t think of an industry that won’t benefit from engaging in a new media strategy, so long as it approaches it properly, tests its messaging along the way and treats it like an individual communications strategy rather than a bolton to existing comms.

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How do you act under pressure?

Ethics and management accounting A new CIMA report highlights members’ concerns around pressure in the workplace

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

‘I believe business has a moral obligation to help address global issues, such as climate change and poverty’ 47%

STRONGLY AGREE

Total 33%

26%

AGREE

Total 49%

38%

51%

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he CGMA report “Managing responsible business”, which was published in May, revealed that up to one in three management accountants sometimes feels under pressure to compromise their organisation’s standards of ethical business conduct. This is the starting point for the new CIMA report “Acting under pressure – how management accountants manage ethical issues”. Findings from nine markets with the highest response rates are highlighted and it was found that pressure can be more prevalent in many of the emerging economies.

The “Acting under pressure” report highlights the areas where management accountants might experience pressure in the workplace, set against the wider ethical environment, as well as exploring the context of five CIMA markets. The report draws on the global CGMA ethics survey responses of 1,760 CIMA members and students and examines, in detail, the pressure points within organisations around the world. It represents more than 80 markets and considers the views of those who work in a range of finance functions, from analyst to chief financial officer.

The skills and behaviours of chartered management accountants are key in responding to ethical challenges.

In addition to the survey, focus groups were held in several CIMA markets – the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Each group explored a common ethical scenario. The discussions raised potential challenges that could be faced locally, and offered recommendations on how such issues could be addressed. The findings from the focus groups affirm that the overall operating

CIMA member CIMA student

Source: CGMA ethics survey

culture, support from management, and transparent operations complying with both local and international regulations and norms, are essential in order to support responsible business.

The survey also showed the differences in the responses between students and members. This may reflect the stage that individuals are at in their career and their confidence in challenging unethical behaviour. Students were more likely to have observed ethical violations, as well as feeling pressure. CIMA students also more strongly agree that business has a role to play in addressing global issues, such as climate change and poverty – issues that have been highlighted more in recent years.

From both the survey and focus groups, CIMA recognises that there are challenges and pressures that members and students face globally. However, CIMA also recognises that, with the support of their organisations and leadership, both members and students have the insights and resources to address them.

What is key is the operating culture of the organisation, its overall corporate governance and how policies and codes are implemented in practice. Technology can support the collection, analysis and reporting of key risk information and organisation-wide metrics and analysis.

This is particularly important as ethical management information can often originate from multiple sources within the business and can be either quantitative or qualitative. With the rise of integrated reporting, capturing and making use of this data to further the interests of the business is more important than ever.

Reporting on ethics information would include an assessment of the organisation’s ethical performance, such as efficacy of relevant policies and procedures,

occurrence of breaches of relevant policies or codes, stakeholder opinion, risk assessments and other metrics. It may also include specific ethics information, such as the number of employees attending ethics training, or calls to an ethics helpline, as well as routine management and risk information. Such information will often originate from multiple sources within the business (e.g. human resources, corporate responsibility departments, logistics, compliance) and can be either quantitative or qualitative.

The rise and gradual “norming” of integrated reporting and use of nonfinancials to measure value means that addressing such issues will become tomorrow’s “business as usual”, rather than the current exception. It appears that most management accountants recognise this, with just a minority (14 per cent) thinking their organisation would not benefit.

Developing relevant skills and helping implement such procedures could also help.

Chartered management accountants have a central role to play, drawing on both their professional training and understanding of professional ethics.

By managing performance, ensuring risk assessment and supporting and driving decision-making, they can create, report and preserve value. This is reinforced by challenging constructively and taking an objective view of the organisation as a whole. Developing the influencing and communication skills, both inside and outside the organisation, to adopt this role is fundamental.

The report also includes the scenario in full so that it can be used by readers and their teams to discuss potential ethical challenges and responses in more detail.

The report is available at www.cimaglobal.com/ethics

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21 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

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New business intelligence technologies are powering companies to dramatic bottom-line improvements. Tim Cooper speaks to some of the CFOs benefiting the most

evelopments in the use of business intelligence (BI) technology are helping some companies to deliver dramatic bottom-line results, and Directski.com is a good example.

In 2010, the tour operator took a considerable risk in acquiring a loss-making chalet company, Ski Beat. In less than two years, Directski.com turned the loss around and Ski Beat, which had been in the red for five years, has broken into profit.

The company’s CFO, Darren Tierney, ACMA, CGMA, estimates that 75 per cent of this success arose from a new pricing strategy, which was based on an enhanced BI modelling exercise, while 25 per cent was due to an improvement in the cost base.

Tour operating, particularly in a recession, is a high-risk, high-reward business, where the ability to forecast accurately is critical.

“Like most tour operators, we commit to or ‘charter’ airline seats and hotel beds, package these with transfers and sell them,” says Tierney.

“Managing this massive fixed cost effectively in terms of capacity, pricing and promotions is where we make our margins.”

In 2009/2010, Directski.com launched a companywide management information system (MIS), which was shortlisted for a CIMA award. “The system was a huge success in pulling data from many sources, both internal and external,” says Tierney. “It focused primarily on historical KPIs and was an aid to decision-making.”

During 2011, use of the MIS grew rapidly and Tierney became acutely aware that the system offered users no insights or recommendations for the future.

The revenue management team continued to price mostly on historical data, competitor prices and gut feeling. The operations, sales and marketing teams still contracted products in the same way.

“The organisation was crying out for reports that would couple the historical data with models or scenarios for the future… to take the guesswork out of decision-making, or at least dramatically improve the odds of making better decisions,” says Tierney.

“The acquisition of Ski Beat made this need even clearer. The organisation’s risk had almost doubled and making better pricing decisions was a priority.

Selling a holiday at the right price and time, and to the right customer based on the MIS, would be challenging, if not impossible. Ski Beat was hugely loss-making, due mainly to heavy discounting. Its pricing was not strategic or planned. Discounts were made mostly too late and on an ad hoc basis. While giving Ski Beat the benefit of our MIS would be beneficial, they needed more.”

In September 2011, Tierney teamed up with Cathal Walsh, professor of statistics at Trinity College Dublin.

Using five years of pricing data for Ski Beat, including brochure prices, lead times, discount percentages and travel dates, Walsh used statistical models to identify trends that would help set pricing in future.

Tierney says: “This removed the guesswork and produced a price/discount model that would enable the revenue management team to maximise fill and margin. The results far outweighed all our expectations. Within four weeks of launching the project, we had cracked the model and our technology team began to integrate it into our MIS. In mid-October, the MIS was providing the team with actual sales and margins and, critically, prompting us on what to do next based on what will or might happen in the future.”

Directski.com’s story is also a great example of how advanced use of BI is freeing up the role of CFOs. Tierney says: “I have always been an advocate of analysing data in different ways to aid decision-making and these results prove that. I’m spending less time on the accounting side of my role and more on business innovation throughout the group. Our CEO has, on »

STATS

89% Eighty-nine per cent of respondents say ‘simple analytics’ is their number one desire when purchasing BI Source: Ventana Research 2012

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

STATS

2010

2011

The global BI software market grew by an estimated 10% in 2011 Source: Gartner 2011

the back of the results to date, given me this freedom, which I really enjoy.”

The blending of BI and predictive analytics methods and technologies to create powerful, forward-looking insights is one of the biggest trends in BI. Jennifer Booth, principal adviser for business intelligence at KPMG, says: “Historically, BI has been reactive, analysing historic events and environments.

Increasingly, we are seeing clients use the more selective, predictive and prescriptive models to help them with forecasting and it becomes a continual learning cycle. The tools to do this have been around for some time. The challenge is embedding them into business processes and making it repeatable.”

Tom Patterson, associate partner at IBM Global Services, agrees, adding: “Senior finance professionals have been clamouring for the integration of disparate corporate IT databases. With persuasion, IT shops are deploying data analysts and business analysts to finally implement data governance and link disparate databases, either into or from data warehouses or other linked databases. These can be used to build predictive analytics applications that drive decision-making.

“One can perform analytics in a richer way with BI systems and tools but what’s often lacking, initially, is the normalisation of analysis into day-to-day operations and turning the results of the analysis into new business processes. This is where analytics needs to go next.”

Engineering firm Ramboll, which employs 10,000 people around the world, is a good example of how organisations are tackling this in practice.

Ramboll has been using BI software for some time to collate data and produce KPIs for trend analysis and benchmarking across business units. Finance director Debbie Montgomery, FCMA, CGMA, says: “We have used [the software] in our business more for historic analysis than predictive tools. The challenge has been the lack of consistency of data definitions and the treatment of data. We are now moving towards putting all our core project and resource data into a central group data warehouse that serves the business across all its locations worldwide.

“To enable this move, the strategy has been to move all business units onto common platforms… designed with standard definitions, parameters and processes to help ensure consistency of data… with the data mapped to a warehouse. We can mine this information to help predict our business performance and highlight future issues.”

KEY MESSAGES Montgomery says this new analysis can assist with: Prediction of order book values Cost modelling for projects of a similar type Business modelling and scenario testing Cash flow forecasting with profiling of clients, market sectors, project type and procurement routes Staff turnover – identifying patterns linked to professional achievements, length of service or promotional activity.

These developments come with risks, however.

Montgomery says: “In the early stages of using these tools there can be insufficient quality data to enable reliable BI outputs. There is also a longer-term risk that the results are taken literally and context is not applied.

It’s easy to see how predictions can be very wrong in a global economic crisis and it is hard to build the effects of unexpected economic events into your BI system.”

However, she believes the theory behind such new processes is good and that the benefits for business predictions should be substantial.

“Enhanced business partnering should be achieved through the use of BI and analytics,” she says. “The ultimate goal is to get quick and easy results from programmed calculations within a system rather than relying on spreadsheet models. Initially, in Ramboll UK, we are creating dashboards with historic and predictive trends to show the key areas for the business units to focus on. This will allow more time for the real partnering to take place, providing guidance on how to interpret and respond to the [analysis] and testing on the impacts of the response.

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‘BI and analytical tools can identify opportunities, confirm or disprove current assumptions and strategies and reveal emergent strategies’

“In an environment where engineers use predictive software to understand how a structure will react to certain factors, they will soon have an appetite for more, particularly if it makes their lives easier and gives them more ‘face time’ with finance.”

While the logistics may be a challenge, the opportunities provided by developments in BI and analytics could become wide-ranging.

Colin Bird, analytics manager, corporate shared services, Network Rail, says: “Technologies in this area have increased dramatically over the past five years.

The main hurdle for BI and the associated technologies has been adoption levels in organisations and turning investments into benefits.

“The introduction of more integrated forecast and reporting technologies has now started to embellish the ‘what if’ scenarios. Technology advancements that enable you to capture and query the huge amounts of data available, referred to as ‘big data’, have given the ability to re-run predicative models over a wider data set and allow better insight into operational and strategic decision-making.”

Bird agrees that integrating analytics into daily operational processes can be a crucial step. “The introduction of action frameworks in BI technologies has led to more constructive analytical workflows,” he says. “Outcomes can now be automated and embedded into business processes. An example would be if you were measuring cash flow and you enabled some alerts to kick-start a system or business process when the measure reaches a certain target or level. This is a key area for BI in the coming years, where data-driven events will allow organisations to be operationally driven by alerts and established plans to deal with different scenarios.”

Bird adds that the increased use of mobile and tablet technologies in organisations will drive a huge change in access to and adoption of BI. “Management accountants who adopt the technologies early will benefit the most,” he says.

Charles Ravenhill, ACMA, CGMA, a senior financial analyst at a leading financial services organisation, says the main talk in BI is about big data. “Social media

sites are a rich data source that businesses can convert into higher sales,” he says. “That is becoming more prevalent, but has further to go.”

Big data is not just of benefit to business. Ravenhill says: “The charity and social sector has not yet tapped this area. For example, whether this means looking for poverty hot spots, areas of poor education or lack of micro-loans – all of these are open areas.”

Jim Hillier, performance and strategy quality manager at insurance company Legal and General, says that developments in BI are allowing finance to have more influence on the business and to be far more creative in their approach to solving problems: “The biggest benefit of using modern BI and analytical tools is their ability to produce many more analytical outcomes. These outcomes can identify opportunities, confirm or disprove current assumptions and strategies and reveal emergent strategies that may not have otherwise been considered. Instead of analytical models that are based on an individual’s belief or hunch, the ability to exploit the processing power of these tools across huge volumes of data allows us to create many more theoretical outcomes, some of which may open up completely new avenues of thought.”

Hillier continues: “We see data as an asset, which continues to appreciate due to the large volumes of data we collect. Finance is increasingly using the data for other purposes, such as identifying fraud, and marketing is increasingly interested in identifying opportunities for cross-selling, customer offers and high-value customers.”

Patterson believes finance professionals need to train in technical areas such as structured query language to take best advantage of new BI and analytics technologies. But Ravenhill says that it is important not to get bogged down in the technical side. “BI is about business knowledge, combined with some IT skills, and the two have to work hand in glove for maximum results. CIMA has championed the idea of being a business partner – predicting and shaping the future instead of writing about the past – this now has to be considered a great opportunity for our profession.”

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A CGMA report by CIMA’s Peter Simons urges management accountants to put themselves at the forefront of driving business intelligence in their organisations

Maximising intelligence

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

he global economic downturn has placed even more pressure on the finance function to produce timely and accurate business forecasts as organisations strive to implement plans in order to maximise business opportunities.

Management accountants are at the forefront of this and business intelligence (BI) is one of the most valuable tools in their armoury.

A recently published CGMA report

by CIMA’s Peter Simons – “Improving decision-making in organisations: unlocking business intelligence” – outlines the current developments in how BI can help transform the finance function, with management accountants at the forefront of maximising its potential.

A survey commissioned by Business Objects from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) found that nine out of ten corporate executives admit to making important decisions on the basis of inadequate information.

Less than one in ten executives in the survey receives information when they need it and 46 per cent assert that wading through huge volumes of data impedes decision-making. Worse still, 56 per cent are often concerned about making poor choices because of faulty, inaccurate or incomplete data.

Simons says that understanding the drivers, or revenue and costs, is essential to ensuring the accuracy of a forecast, but that a range of varying outcomes is unlikely to have been considered without better information.

These forecasting limitations were recognised by the major providers of operating systems and databases, such as SAP, Oracle and IBM, and so they acquired leading financial software companies, such as Business Object, Hyperion and Cognos.

Aviation, banking, insurance, retail and online businesses have led the way in the use of BI, though other sectors will follow as it becomes more affordable.

Though IT has the expertise to deliver the technology, it’s management accountants who will unlock BI’s potential.

Simons says that the in-depth information that BI can deliver is needed in order to survive a recession and thrive afterwards, and that those organisations that continue to invest to improve their competitive position, while at the same time cutting costs to improve operating efficiency, have the best prospects of emerging successfully.

Failure to invest in better information systems could prove to be a false economy, as businesses need to be able to respond quickly to threats or opportunities. Simons adds that BI can help to create long-term value, as well as meeting budgets, by giving management accountants the in-depth information needed to use their financial expertise, business understanding and strategic reasoning.

The report also argues that the cost of BI may not be as prohibitive as first thought.

KEY MESSAGES The report sets out five action points for management accountants in successfully implementing BI: 1 Developing the business case and a

2 3

4 5

plan to realise the benefits, with firm commitments from those who are expected to deliver the results.

Implementing successfully, with buy-in from those who will be using the system.

Ensuring quality data, particularly the integrity of ‘master data’ considered necessary to inform business decisions.

Tracking the right metrics and providing analysis to manage performance.

Conducting in-depth analysis to support evidence-based decision-making.

Most large organisations will already have an ERP system and database – the core, usually the most expensive building blocks of a BI stack. Simons says that from here an organisation needs to look at an organisation-wide programme that has a common approach and consistency in data controls. He adds that although there should be some cost savings through efficiency gains, BI has more to do with value creation.

In one of the report’s case studies, Liam Roche, finance director of homeware, hardware and gardening equipment at Irish-based McLoughlin’s (turnover €20m) said affordable software tools are now available for even small organisations. He added that he believed BI will be one of the key drivers of business development in the medium term.

For BI to provide enterprise value, it must be integrated into the way an organisation looks at itself and makes decisions. The report argues that BI should result in more robust and higher-quality information that provides an insight into end-to-end business processes, making them information-rich and integrated.

In the report’s conclusion, Simons argues that management accountants should champion BI, even though it may threaten their traditional role in producing financial and management information.

The report concludes: “There can be no long-term future in holding back the tide of progress. While there will be opportunities for some management accountants to become experts in using business intelligence and conducting more advanced analysis, for many more BI presents an opportunity to take on financial management or business partnering roles. The future for these accountants may not be in accounts but in finance, as players on the team rather than as scorekeepers on the side.”

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Simon Jeffery ACMA, CGMA, head of finance at Siem Car Carriers, explains how technology has benefited his organisation The term business intelligence (BI) is often used to describe the technical architecture of systems that extract, assemble, store and access data to provide reports and analysis for business. It can also be used to describe reporting and analysis applications or performance management tools. But BI is not just about hardware and software. It is about a company-wide recognition that its data is an important strategic asset that can yield valuable insights. It can require a change in behaviours so that decisions are based on the evidence available.

Management accountants (MAs) have key roles to play in providing this management information.

BI is about helping the business to make the right decisions. For MAs, BI can be the tool that helps them communicate with the business and “tell the story behind the numbers”. Yet, BI still seems to sit within the remit of the IT department, with MAs engaging with it at a superficial level and basing the decision to invest on purely budgetary terms.

In the same way that spreadsheets introduced a new way to analyse data, BI offers even more ways of accessing, analysing and presenting data that can help accountants contribute more to the management of risk and performance within organisations.

THE MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANT

Simon Jeffery, ACMA, CGMA, head of finance of Siem Car Carriers, part of Siem Shipping Group, an international shipping company, is an MA who understands the value of BI to his company and has been at the forefront of integrating it into his role. According to Simon, MAs must be the champions of BI and should

be at the forefront of developing the business case for it.

He introduced BI into the business while working in the ship management department. “We had a very limited set of reports produced manually on spreadsheets, which were very difficult to analyse. So, I actually introduced some BI using Crystal Reports and an Oracle database which meant we could run the monthly reports in Crystal.” This presented him with a way to show monthly reports on the screen and the functionality to drill straight down into the accounting numbers and see what was driving the figures. “So, in four clicks you could be down to the purchase orders. You could see, for example, if lube oil costs were higher than budgeted. You could then drill down further and see where the purchases were actually made.” This level of visibility allowed the business to negotiate better terms with its supplier as well as gain a deeper insight into the ports that had the cheapest oil.

What BI offers is the insight into the cost drivers for the business. Simon explains that the key was to look behind the profit and loss accounts and understand what was driving those numbers. “For every financial number you see, you can produce a non-financial driver...” By integrating different data sources and building a robust dataset, the non-financial information completes the picture and adds important detail.

Through the use of industry-specific KPIs known as the Ship Management Indicators (created by InterManager and which Simon picked up on a Lloyd’s Maritime Academy course), Simon has been able to track the company’s financial, safety, technical, HR and environmental performance against industry standards. This has allowed

the business to manage its performance as well as ensure that processes are being performed correctly.

This lifts the accountant away from the budgeting and reporting cycle into a more analytical and business-focused role. When Simon first started within the Group with Star Reefers, he found the management team were frustrated with the lack of useful business information. “When I started, I went to Poland to see the fleet manager there.

He said ‘Oh, no, not another accountant!’ He didn’t want someone who was just going to provide him with accounting information – he really wanted to understand what was driving his numbers in his business.” Simon explained to the manager that his role was to work alongside him and provide a wealth of non-financial information, based on industry-specific KPIs. “I will give you the information you will need to do your job,” Simon assured him.

A notable success for Jeffery was when he was able to minimise losses in

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Technology: finance’s best friend insurance claims on damaged cargo for his own organisation. In this particular case, cars from a US manufacturer were being loaded onto ships for China and incurring damages along the supply chain. These damages (which resulted in large insurance claims to the business) were logged on a third-party web-based system which was very inflexible and provided single dimensional data. Data on the damaged cars could only be seen one car at a time, which made it very difficult to get a feel for what was happening overall.

To get a more comprehensive view of the data, Simon worked with iFleet Systems, Siem Car Carriers outsource IT providers, to download all the data into one place and start to analyse it. He then discovered that there was one port and, in particular, one dealer that was reporting the most wheel/ tyre damages to the cars (30%-50% of all the claims were wheel/tyre damage). By identifying this major source of damages, the business managed to immediately save

up to US$100,000 a year in insurance claims. In addition to the direct savings in his business, it also raised the problem with the manufacturer, which was then able to make changes to how the cars were loaded onto ships.

“Once you understand what drives the cost, you get a picture of what the costs are and then speak to the operations and commercial guys and they will say: ‘Well, it looks like we can save here or talk to these people here.’ You find that sometimes they are surprised themselves and it gives you a strong hand when it comes to negotiations.

That adds a lot of value.”

Through the use of graphics (dashboards) and drill-down capabilities, BI enables the accountant to present all the relevant information on one screen. “You have to visualise what picture you want to present and create a dashboard that helps you understand the business in 20 seconds.

It is important to spend time on presentation and presenting it clearly. It is

better for me to spend the extra time on the presentation, so the CEO can save that extra five minutes.”

Simon’s insights support the case made in the recently published CGMA report entitled “Improving decision making in organisations: unlocking business intelligence”. This report alerts accountants to developments in BI. It argues that MAs should be engaged in developing the business case for BI projects and their implementation. If MAs can help to unlock the potential in BI, it could, in turn, unlock their potential to improve their business’s performance. They are the knowledge workers best placed to ensure data quality and to generate reports or conduct analysis to make sure decisions are evidence based.

This article is based on a CGMA report – “Improving decision making in organisations: unlocking business intelligence” – which can be downloaded at www.cgma.org

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A fast track to leadership The changing face of the finance function means businesses need different skills from their finance staff. But those skills can also help them become the finance leaders of tomorrow…

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he impact of globalisation, a changing regulatory space, technological developments, volatility and increased competition are all driving a fast pace of change in the finance function. In turn, these developments are creating a lot of problems, risks and challenges for boards, driving the CFO, in particular, to become increasingly involved in other parts of the business, and to be more strategic.

That was the message from a roundtable discussion of global CFOs and other finance leaders in London recently, which also addressed the skills and experience required to become a finance leader today.

One participant, from an international property development, investment and fund management group, said that while this current climate provides challenges for finance teams, it is also an opportunity. “It’s a great opportunity for finance to take a lead,” he said. “CEOs will turn to finance a lot more. I wouldn’t say that finance has always been locked in the cupboard; we’ve always been there at the heart of the organisation. But when businesses are struggling, »

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‘Finance comes to the fore, not just because of the rigour that we have, but also because of the value of the information we provide’

finance is inevitably the function which steps forward a lot more, mainly because it has a greater breadth and understanding of the business due to the areas it supports.”

Another participant, from the finance sector, agreed finance shows its true value in challenging times: “I think that finance comes to the fore not just because of the rigour that we have, but also the value of the information we provide to help in a fundamentally fast-moving, volatile market,” he said.

“We need instant, quality information and the ability to look at that and interpret it. I was a CEO for a while and the best thing you can have is a really smart commercial finance director on board.

When the market gets tough and we all get low margins and a far more volatile market, you want someone who can summarise information and give you the options and the risks.”

THE CHANGING FACE OF FINANCE

One member of the discussion, from event partner Hays, agreed the current climate is an opportunity for finance to show its worth, and added that the function is far better placed to do so than in previous tough economic times.

“The first thing to note is the commerciality of the finance function today,” she said. “If you look at previous recessions, finance’s role was all about taking costs out of the business. Now it’s about targeting cost reduction in a way that doesn’t damage the business so badly that it can never recover. The other difference is the way that the finance director, in particular, is much more engaged with the outside world. Twenty or 30 years ago, the

finance director would have been engaged but not actually understanding the way in which the markets were impacting the business. That’s totally changed now and finance is really driving the business.”

A participant from the financial services sector agreed finance has evolved: “For me, the big shift is that finance has become future-focused and is driving change. I’ve noticed a lot more big initiatives being led by the finance function, whether they’re strategic initiatives or big change programmes.”

In order to meet the skills challenge created by the finance function’s broader role, participants agreed that finance professionals today need a wider skills set and broader experience. But all agreed that a technical grounding remains vital.

“You’ve got three starters for attaining a good career,” said a participant from the financial services sector. “Hard work is one, technical expertise is another and honesty overlays those. Those three starter ingredients give you your entry ticket – then it’s up to you how broad or how narrow you want to be.”

Other panellists agreed that a finance qualification and a grounding in the technical skills are essential in the early stages of finance professionals’ careers.

Nevertheless, there was a consensus that what’s required afterwards is a far broader set of skills and experiences.

One attendee, from the healthcare sector, noted: “You’ve got to invest in your junior staff to make sure that they’re technically competent. Then you can add the commercial skills sets so they become a real asset to the finance team – and the wider business as well.”

However, another participant from the financial services sector argued that the success of that approach will be down to the individual.

“You can train people in the technical stuff but you can’t train them to have an innate, commercial curiosity,” he said.

“I want people who are commercially curious – who want to understand the business, how it ticks, who spot an opportunity or an issue and are then going to take the next step to try to figure out what to do.”

Another participant agreed that some finance professionals show stronger leadership abilities than others, early on in their careers.

“What my organisation does really well is to bring in people who have that curiosity and the wider leadership skills early on in their career,” said a participant from the financial services sector. “They understand the power of communication; they understand the power of working in teams; they understand the power of working with each other, and being prepared to ask a stupid question and not be worried about it.”

In addition, the panel agreed that it’s important for finance professionals to gain experience outside their own function – to gain that broader business knowledge that leaders need today.

“Finance is increasingly becoming the public face of the organisation,” said one participant. “CFOs are now out there getting funding, talking to regulators, auditors, media and contributing to company-wide strategies.

So they have to develop that knowledge of other parts of the business.”

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BROADENING HORIZONS

“I agree,” added another member of the discussion. “If you’re in a meeting with sales or the CIO or the procurement team, and you can help them get their deal done faster because you understand their part of the business, that helps make finance more influential and, in turn, drives your influence.”

OVERSEAS EXPERIENCE AND MENTORING

The discussion also heard that working overseas will often enable future leaders to develop broader skills more quickly, as they will be subjected to new experiences and be empowered to take on more responsibility.

“I spent a couple of years in China,” said an attendee from the property sector.

“The whole cultural experience was clearly amazing but the biggest thing was being exposed to new tasks. I was dealing with fraud, implementing new systems, restructuring a finance team and writing new processes. You’re getting lots of experience very quickly because you’re encountering different problems, different perspectives.”

“As a finance person, you’ve got to get yourself out of the comfort zone to get that extra experience that shows your next boss that you’re starting to build that diversity very early on,” another participant added.

In addition to providing staff with the opportunity to gain experience overseas, the discussion heard that businesses should adopt other strategies for developing future leaders.

Good companies, said a member of the financial services sector, use leaders to develop new leaders, and adopt strong mentoring programmes.

“We have a mentoring programme.

It isn’t well advertised but it is out there.

Many of the peers that I come across within finance functions, though, have just approached somebody – and people have approached me, too – saying, ‘I’d like you to be my mentor’ and meet once a month or once every two or three months just to talk through any issues or to provide any advice that might help their careers.

“You generally find your own mentor.

We have had formal mentoring programmes but they never worked as well as somebody just finding another person they know they can connect with.

I think people find that when they do it that way they get a more open and honest conversation. It’s about helping each other out.”

SATISFYING GENERATIONS X, Y AND Z

Despite all this, the discussion heard that one of the major challenges for finance in the future will be to develop and retain good people.

“Of course, a major issue we face is the change in expectations from different generations,” concluded Ana Barco, who hosted the event on behalf of CIMA. “Years ago, you would have expected the people you are developing to be with your organisation for 20 or 30 years. Generations X, Y and even Z, are different and they want shorter stays, more moving around organisations, getting different experiences – in some cases, you’ll be lucky to have them for four or five years. That throws a whole new challenge into your plans to develop future finance leaders.”

The discussion also heard that it’s more difficult for up and coming staff to gain experience of the transactional and operational roles because these are being done in outsourced facilities.

“Shared services, BPO, technology, and finance transformation all mean that many firms, particularly large organisations, are not doing a lot of the operational and transactional work any more,” commented one participant. “So when we talk about building finance specialism and really at the start of your career having that exposure to where the numbers come from, it’s really challenging. We’re getting a feeling that certain organisations are nervous about what that means in terms of long-term talent pipelines.”

A participant from the healthcare sector agreed, and said that at one of his previous organisations, he had adapted the graduate programme to ensure that experience is not lost.

“I headed up the finance graduate scheme and I designed in a year, one year of the three, where the finance graduates had to work at the BPO centre. We started it with just four of them and now we take 20 a year to India. It’s absolutely crucial.”

Another participant, from the card services sector, agreed, and added that gaining exposure to other parts of the finance function is also crucial.

“Are you going to get the right level of experience unless you have a finance rotation built in? We have two rotation programmes. One is for graduates and one is for finance professionals already in their finance role for a few years, which is designed to move them around the business. It’s crucial to giving them all the skills they need to be leaders.”

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

Capitalising on your most valuable asset: information

The age of ‘big data’ is an opportunity for CFOs and finance departments to drive growth by identifying trends and reacting quickly to the information they hold internally, says Steve O’Neill, CFO of EMEA-North at EMC

s the role of the CFO evolves to counterbalance and drive growth in a more volatile market, the financial tools on offer need to change to accommodate their needs. Across all industries, the role of the CFO has undoubtedly gained power, influence and respect. Though previously focused purely on the financial management of businesses, the role is increasingly strategic, tasked with evaluating shifts in business strategy, modelling new product successes (and failures) and assessing new market opportunities – all directed at delivering predictable growth and stability

in today’s turbulent times. An increasingly complex morass of regulations, both local and farther afield, must also be taken into account.

Thanks to the increasing power of business technology, we have more information than ever before to help us make better business decisions. The difficulty for CFOs is that not only do they need to pay to capture, store, search, share and analyse this data within the corporate firewall, they also need to enable the business to find increasingly constructive ways to mine data from inside and outside the corporate firewall and transform it into valuable, actionable information.

This is where the power of big data analytics can help. Big data is being recognised by forward-thinking finance

brains as the answer to this issue of information overload. Big data analytics is a new set of technologies that promises to draw together structured and unstructured data, generate actionable insight and inform business strategy – all in real time.

Retrospective scrutiny has its place, but live, real-time analysis has become increasingly important. Technologies that address the problems and the potentials of big data mean that real-time analysis can continue, and become increasingly streamlined.

How would this play out in practice?

Let’s say you’re an online retailer and you want to increase the basket value from each customer: in assessing the potential value of stocking a new category of product, you might want to consider a variety of

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

‘Retrospective scrutiny has its place, but live, real-time analysis has become increasingly important’

Illustration: Dale Edwin-Murray

Steve O’Neill CFO of EMEA-North at EMC

possibilities, including conversation topics between your existing customers on social media networks, weather forecasts in realtime and trend data relating to customer shopping patterns. All of this data needs to be captured – sometimes from data sources you own and sometimes from external ones – as well as brought together and modelled.

This is what big data analytics platforms do – and companies such as Amazon are already making full use of them.

Another benefit of this type of insight is a more sophisticated, agile business, able to capitalise on new trends or opportunities in near real-time. One of our customers, O’Reilly Media, uses EMC Greenplum big data analytics to collect and analyse hundreds of thousands of IT job postings to glean insights into key trends in the technology industry. This information is then used to spot consumer trends and develop topics for its books, conferences, and consulting and custom research businesses, helping its own internal business strategy.

As a result, the company has been able to stay one step ahead of its competitors by drawing richer conclusions about the technology industry from its data and therefore developing books and conferences covering up-to-the-minute topics. Through big data, O’Reilly has been able to retain its reputation as a trendspotter and excel in its role of educating the IT industry.

If you can successfully monetise your own data assets through the development of core revenue streams and business models that can be unlocked, then this is another clear opportunity for the CFO that can be

provided by the smart management of big data. A particularly prominent example here is the New York Stock Exchange: the exchange set up a company called NYSE Technologies to let customers have access, in real time, to every piece of historical data, transaction and “tick” ever to cross its systems. NYSE Technologies, which is one of the largest data producers within the financial space, uses EMC Greenplum data analytics to harvest data more quickly so that it can be processed faster and used for surveillance, reporting and basic business intelligence. It is now marketing this data as a service to other companies, which can model their market engagements using this real-time feed. The team at NYSE Tech has capitalised on its datasets to create a new revenue stream for the businesses, with all the benefits that that brings.

This idea of using data to support business decisions is something that I have experienced first-hand. Being a CFO within a company that strives to help other organisations to manage their data gives me a huge advantage. Heavily ingrained within the processes of the company, big data is used within the wider context of the business to make efficiencies in areas such as transaction cost economics (TCE) and revenue control, sales and marketing and risk management – all essential for the financial analysis needed to do my job. The use of big data analytics also helps us to find and target new customers by highlighting gaps in the market and the opportunities available to further develop the portfolios of current clients. Correlating events is »

KEY MESSAGES 1 Work closely with your CIO to ensure 1 the analytical requirements you

2

3

4

5

have from the company’s information are met.

Educate from grassroots to board level so that all staff understand the importance and value that can be derived from information.

Research how other companies are using big data analytics to see if any best practice examples are suitable to be integrated into your business.

Develop a joined-up approach to big data across the whole of your business, rather than single isolated cases – valuable information can be captured at any level and department.

Develop a strategy that works best for you; big data is too varied and complex for a one-size-fits-all solution.

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

also useful when analysing the demands across the entire data centre, as it enables us to predict performance, failures and capacity and respond accordingly so that the business processes of the company aren’t compromised.

Big data also plays a significant role in the way in which I’m able to analyse the financial health of the company. For example, my department has been able to combine the analysis of employee mobile phone bills with international travel trends in order to find the most cost-effective data plans. We’ve also been able to control company expenditure by pinpointing ambiguities in invoice and purchase orders through pattern analysis. In regards to highlighting discrepancies within the sales and purchasing ledgers, the use of big data enables us to pinpoint statistical irregularities that can then be investigated and solved. Finally, we’ve been able to plan ahead for fluctuations in headcount by using recruitment analytics to predict future growth and trends in the market.

This enables us to not only prepare the HR department, but to ensure the finance department can budget accordingly.

As these examples highlight, by tapping into the power of big data, CFOs can improve the financial reporting models of the business and derive intelligence from trends that, over time, will naturally lead to a deeper understanding of where the company is headed. CFOs nowadays must recognise the value of information as a business asset unto itself. Once that is the case, converting raw data into recognisable sources of revenue becomes possible.

Digging deeper into your organisation enables you to consider and support your business in new ways. The increased business insight delivered by big data analytics tools will enable you to ask the questions you never even knew to ask about your business – and lead you to some important answers around your competitive advantage, potential for innovation, and ability to exploit new market opportunities.

While the vast amount of information we possess is exploding, each piece holds a unique value that is waiting to be mined and interpreted. By equipping their organisations to deploy powerful new analytical tools and harness big data effectively, the CFO can assist his or her business to exploit new intelligence, spot emerging business trends and accelerate go-to-market initiatives that may otherwise have been impossible to conceive.

Making a big deal out of ‘big data’ ‘Big data’ may be the latest ‘big thing’ in business, but just because there is hype doesn’t mean there has to be immediate action, says KPMG’s Eddie Short The temptation to be seen as one of the first organisations to adopt new technology or new ways of doing things is high – but often the opportunities gained from watching and learning are even more valuable.

There is a saying: “If you know who your customer is, you know what your customer wants”, and for some organisations this is enough of a business case to enter the big data world. But it shouldn’t be.

Having access to inexorably large amounts of data doesn’t mean organisations can automatically do anything useful with it.

That is why the CFO has to ensure that a robust culture is developed within their organisation. In the current climate, few organisations can afford to throw money at a new initiative so the key is to identify what data is needed, how it can be mined and from where, before investing in a system or solution that makes all of this possible. Put simply, big data needs careful management

and strong governance to ensure the business case stacks up.

As we strive for economic recovery the businesses that will grow will be those where the CFO urges teams to stop gathering data and to spend more time understanding the data they already possess.

Perhaps the solution lies in changing mentalities. It’s easy to think of big data around the “three Vs” of velocity, volume and variety. The speed of receiving and using masses of information, then tailoring it to individual customer needs has, after all, been a marketing panacea for some time. But in today’s marketplace there are questions around who actually owns the data (and with that, how it can be used) meaning that what really matters is the value of the data in an organisation’s possession. Until C-level executives understand this, their inability to meet customer needs will continue to harm the bottom line.

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‘Organisations that have traditionally had to deal with large volumes of data – public sector and retail – are already grasping the nettle’ Eddie Short Partner and head of business intelligence at KPMG UK

However, the biggest difficulty faced by many organisations revolves around the vast quantities of big data generated outside the business. With customers, employees and even suppliers constantly posting messages across the likes of Google+, Facebook and Twitter, it has never been harder – or more important – to be clear how information is disseminated and controlled as it is brought into the organisation, and how this data informs strategic decision-making.

But herein lies another problem.

Marketeers and others have always bought data from industry third parties. The issue is that they are now drowning in data, unsure of what to do with it and adding in complexity upon complexity as they look to make sense of the information they have.

The good news is that businesses just grappling with big data don’t have to walk in the dark. In today’s data-heavy world, the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook have set the standards for others to follow.

Best practice is also not just in evidence in the entrepreneurial, social media sector.

Organisations that have traditionally had to deal with large volumes of data – many in the public sector and retail environments spring to mind – are already grasping the nettle in order to get to grips with online competitors.

They all have several approaches in common. First and foremost is the identification of the most valuable data. This should revolve around the core elements that might include customer, product, time, response and location information.

Then comes analysis of what information is required by all decentralised functions, governance of its use and the need to refine the data. This is probably more important than the time many spend worrying about the technology actually being used.

Of course, it’s also vital to remember that one size does not fit all. Moving to a centralised data solution may fail. It may also not be required, so creating a roadmap towards “information architecture” is a far better option. It will not only ensure the best solution for an individual business is found, but will save unnecessary investment at a time when few can afford it.

BIG DATA AND ETHICS: THE VIEW FROM THE INSTITUTE OF BUSINESS ETHICS Judith Irwin, senior researcher at the both the public and private sector (e.g.

Institute of Business Ethics, says: As a WikiLeaks published several sensitive finance professional, you may be using and classified documents leaked from analytics and business intelligence software governments in the UK and US and in your day-to-day job. How can you make Yahoo’s recent loss of users’ passwords).

2 Property: Who owns the data that the sure that you use these technologies in a way that does not contravene your analytics are based on and that the professional ethics or the ethics of your analytics produce? Who has a right to organisation? The following simple ethical it? And who has the right to access it?

3 Accountability: Who is accountable framework can help you towards making the right decisions. Ask yourself: when something goes wrong? Who 1 Transparency: Would I mind telling is responsible for the accuracy of the data, integration of data fragmentation, our customers or my friends and reliability of the analytics and the family about the methods behind integrity of the systems? our business’s differential pricing or customer-screening systems?

2 Effect: Who does my decision affect or Recent legislation changes in Europe have sought to address some of these issues. hurt?

3 Fairness: Would it be considered fair by 1 However, just because something is legal, it does not always mean it is ethical. The those affected? Would our customers fast pace of change in technology means be angry if they knew what our that the law sometimes has to play “catch organisation does with their personal up”. Applying your professional values data? Would you be angry if your data of integrity, objectivity, competence and were treated in this way? confidentiality to your use of this new generation of software will mean that, The debate on the ethical issues as technology changes, you can keep up around analytics technology – which is with ethical developments, too. predictive, collaborative and pervasive There are, and always will be, grey – can, broadly speaking, be focused on areas that create ethical dilemmas. three key areas of concern: 1 Privacy: Customers are putting Finance professionals need to be aware of the potential ethical issues involved increasing pressure on organisations in analytics and business intelligence to justify the storage of their personal data. Their concerns as to how their data technologies. Developing your “ethical sensitivity” and skills for dealing with is being used and its security are well ethical issues that arise is one way of founded. There have been numerous staying a step ahead. high-profile incidents of data loss in

41 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

Get involved with CIMA CIMA professionalism and ethics

Gallery Stock

In light of the financial crisis and the ongoing turbulence in the world’s economies, there has never been a more important time to address the issues concerning ethics and ethical behaviour within organisations around the world.

To discuss the ethical pressures faced by organisations, and the subsequent CGMA report, Nicola Maher, editor of The Accountant, hosted a panel of experts to discuss ethical culture, accounting for ethics, dilemmas, pressures and business issues. The “Managing responsible business – the future of ethics” webcast debate is available to watch on www.cgma.org/ resources.

CIMA is also looking for input from members around the world. If you would

like to contribute to future ethics events or research, email camilla.hedborg@ cimaglobal.com.

Now on CGMA.org The following resources are now available online: • “The Invisible Elephant & the Pyramid Treasure: Tomorrow’s Leadership – the transpersonal journey” There’s been a radical change in the demands of leadership over the past 15 years, prompted by social and technological change, globalisation and concern about the environment. This report outlines a new leadership model to meet these new demands.

• “The fast track to leadership: the challenges, opportunities and action plan” Finance is evolving from a focus on the

transactional and cost efficiency areas, through an analytical and decision support stage to a strategic focus that can make a real impact. This report includes global interviews and senior roundtables to capture the changing requirements in skills, experience and behaviours needed for forward-looking organisations.

• How to develop a strong and interdependent team Successful financial leaders create an attitude of interdependence that requires every team member to become fully accountable. This leads to reliability, competence and strength.

This report highlights how financial leaders enhance their skills in developing strong and interdependent teams. For more information, visit www.cgma.org.

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

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T

he relationship between finance and technology has become very much two-way in recent years.

Within the firm, we obviously have technology in the sense of providing technology solutions for finance to do its job and support the overall business. You also have finance supporting technology as a function because it has an overall budget to manage and requires financial decision support to ensure its cost base is managed in the most optimal manner.

I primarily work on the investment banking side, and one of the real strengths for me is that I get a better outcome in terms of how our budgets are negotiated at the start of the year if our finance partners and overall budget owners have a good understanding of how our money is spent, and if they are able to clearly see the value-add and the return on investment that results from that spending. That relationship can help technology form better business cases year on year to improve funding and deliver greater backing for key programmes and deliverables for the business.

What’s changed in recent years is that finance is playing a bigger role in telling the finance story, identifying what the figures mean and bringing them to life, as well as driving problem-solving and helping us to move forward. It is no longer the balance sheet, numbercrunching department it once was and that has really added value in terms of how other functions perceive finance.

In the banking sector we have recently seen a lot of focus on return on investment and the yield we deliver to customers. With so much focus on efficiency to achieve that, finance has become even more important in helping us to deliver this.

Nowadays, we work closely with finance on everything from what businesses we invest in to what solutions

‘Finance brings plenty to the table’ Today, finance is playing an ever-increasing role as an influential business partner. But what are the benefits for those on the other side of that relationship? Julie Evans, head of technology, Singapore, at Barclays, explains what a strong relationship with finance means to the technology function we pitch to the business from a technology point of view. That’s partly due to the fact that we are part of the same overarching business unit, but I think it’s something we would have developed in any case.

To help our working relationship, we are now much closer together in a physical sense. I am based in Singapore and we recently moved into a new building that accommodates all our infrastructure groups in the heart of the finance district. It allows us to have more face-to-face meetings and means we naturally involve each other in the discussions we are having. This is indicative of the collaborative culture we have at Barclays.

Julie Evans Julie Evans is a managing director and head of technology for Singapore at Barclays.

Previously, she held a number of senior positions, including head of Barclays Capital fund solutions technology, core frameworks technology, and money markets technology. She joined Barclays in 2004 from Deutsche Bank and holds a masters in business administration.

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Cybercrime’s murky waters

The European Commission wants organisations to report data breaches within 24 hours of them occurring.

Few are convinced that it is practicable

45 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

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n January the European Commission unveiled proposed regulation aimed at giving European citizens greater control over their personal data. The toughened rules aim to overhaul existing data protection legislation implemented 17 years ago that has failed to keep pace with developments on the internet, such as social media.

Released on 25 January, the new proposals include users having a “right to be forgotten” and an obligation on public and private sector organisations to report data breaches “as soon as possible” – if feasible within 24 hours of occurrence.

Under the European Commission’s proposed EU data laws, firms face being fined up to 2 per cent of their global annual turnover if they breach the rules. The European Union’s (EU) executive body has put forward the suggestion because of “divergent” enforcement actions across the 27 member states regarding the use – and abuse – of consumer data. The justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, hopes that the regulation will be in effect by the summer of 2013.

Companies have hardly welcomed the proposals.

US telecoms giant AT&T’s chief privacy officer Bob Quinn has said that the 24-hour window for data breach notifications is “absolutely unworkable”. He points out that once a breach is discovered, the organisation has to stop it, limit the impact, understand what happened, identify the root cause and figure out who was affected.

All this in 24 hours is just not feasible and would wind up requiring organisations to notify everyone, and not just the ones who had been affected, he says.

Many others agree. Greg Jones, director at IT security consultancy Digital Assurance, says that most organisations are not equipped to detect and act on external data breaches within 24 hours. “Unless they are aware of an attack they simply can’t report it,” says Jones.

Ross Brewer, vice president and managing director for international markets at LogRhythm, says that a 24-hour window within which to accurately identify exactly the systems and customer data affected by a breach will be an extremely tough ask for any business to comply with.

“If organisations don’t have a clear grasp of exactly what information has been lost, the severity of an incident may be overstated, leading to a loss of confidence among potential and existing customers, and organisations may have to notify every individual who might have been affected by a breach rather than just those who definitely were. In addition, the cost of informing an individual that their data may have been stolen is just as high as telling them it definitely has and is often an unnecessary expense,” says Brewer.

Another key problem, says Guy Wilmot, solicitor at UK law firm Russell-Cooke, is that “organisations complain that complying with these rules is likely to require considerable engagement by staff in the critical first 24 hours following a breach. They are concerned that rather than taking steps to deal with the breach immediately and stop further breaches, valuable staff time and resources will be spent dealing with the notification requirements”.

Richard Walters, chief technology officer of cloud security and compliance company SaaSID, says that the notion of forcing organisations to report cyber breaches within 24 hours of them taking place is not practicable.

“Nortel [the large telecom vendor] was unaware that it had been hacked until ten years after its breach. Instead, notifying the relevant European information security commissioner within 24 hours of becoming aware of the breach is more feasible. However, this would have to be enforced with penalties for failing to report a discovered breach, otherwise, if organisations know the legislation has no teeth, they simply won’t comply,” he says.

Some experts agree that the Commission would do well to change the notification period to one that organisations can more readily comply with. Sue Gold, a partner specialising in data protection and privacy at law firm Osborne Clarke, says that it would be more realistic to require notification “without undue delay” rather than specify a time period.

She also points out that the rules as drafted require all breaches to be notified to the regulators without any reference to risk and impact on privacy. “This could lead to an abundance of reports where in practice

KEY MESSAGES

The European Commission has proposed regulation aimed at increasing individuals’ control over their data.

It includes: 1 An obligation

on public and private sector organisations to report data breaches “as soon as possible”.

2 Potential fines of up to 2 per cent of firms’ global annual turnover for rules breaches.

3 Experts say that the Commission should change the notification period to one that organisations can more readily comply with.

46 Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

STATS

Cyber security is now in the list of the top five risks for businesses to watch Source: WEF Global Risks 2012 report.

there is no risk to data, such as the loss of a laptop where data is encrypted. Furthermore, identifying individuals who have been affected can take some time, particularly where only part of a database has been compromised,” says Gold.

Yet despite the difficulties and challenges that the proposed rules could bring, some believe that the Commission’s efforts will prompt organisations to think more carefully about data protection. Gold says that requiring notification to individuals affected will assist individuals in taking steps to mitigate risk, such as changing passwords and checking credit card statements.

Jones says that organisations need to be proactive, have an awareness of their vulnerabilities and be alert. “The 24-hour notice period is currently difficult to enforce, but it should be welcomed. Going public within 24 hours will make crisis response a ‘must have’ rather than a ‘nice to have’,” he says.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer for policy, has said such moves will also improve consumer awareness of what they can do to protect their own personal data. She believes that receiving a breach notification notice will make users aware of a potential problem and give them time to act to protect themselves.

But some still have a feeling that the proposals fall short. Walters believes that what would be more constructive would be if anonymised details of the method used to breach systems were made public.

“Given the fact that the information security threat landscape is constantly evolving and, in particular, the increasing sophistication of advanced persistent threats, this sharing of attack methodology would be invaluable,” he says.

Presently, very few European countries currently have binding breach notifications: those that do include Germany, Austria and Spain. In the UK the Information Commissioner (ICO), the data protection regulator, says that a breach should be notified within a month or “as soon as possible” in the case of a serious breach (though this is a non-binding guideline).

Public authorities, telecom providers and ISPs are required to notify the ICO of breaches, though loss of encrypted data – such as an encrypted laptop – would not need to be reported. In other sectors the ICO has established a series of guidelines to determine when to notify them and when to notify individuals based on the amount of data, the nature of the breach and potential impact on individuals such as ID theft.

In the US much of the applicable regulation is state by state without an overall federal framework – California set the precedent for mandatory reporting of IT security breaches with Senate Bill 1386, which came into effect in 2003.

Furthermore, many US regulations require only that the data subjects whose data may have been breached are notified without a central notification to a regulator.

But all that might be about to change. In June five Republican senators introduced what has been dubbed the “Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2012” as a way to compel corporations and other entities to disclose data breaches. It would set a national standard for data breach notification, which would trump a system in which 46 states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands all have different laws.

The bill – if enacted – will require that data owners, as well as the Secret Service or the FBI, be informed of the loss “as expeditiously as practicable”. Such data would include Social Security numbers, financial data and security codes or passwords. Failure to comply would result in a fine of as high as US$500,000. The entities must disclose how the information was stolen and how to contact the company in question. There are exceptions for such notifications in the case of national security.

The bill requires companies to take “reasonable measures” to protect data. It says that if data is “encrypted, redacted, or secured by any other method or technology that renders the data elements unusable”, then even if that data were stolen, it would not be considered a breach. However, experts point out that the language saying data is exempt if it is rendered “unusable” is probably an impossible standard, since there is almost no encryption that could absolutely make that guarantee. The term “reasonable measures” may also not be prescriptive enough, say lawyers.

The measures have some support. James Arlen, senior consultant with IT consultancy Taos, believes a national, or even global, standard is “absolutely” required. “A hodge-podge of state level regulations makes adherence difficult and provides too much leeway for malicious interpretation,” he says. “Without a reasonable standard for notification, it becomes possible for corporations to hide malfeasance. That’s simply not OK.” But cynics point out that no one should hold their breath on this passing anytime soon: bills like this have been circulating on Capitol Hill for years, going as far back as 2003, and circulating again in 2006 and 2009, only to stall.

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Chris Field, of technology provider Infor, outlines how modern-day corporate reporting is driving developments in technology to meet the demand for greater speed, detail and accuracy

A tale of two technologies: modern corporate reporting and the IT making it happen

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s businesses increasingly understand and look to capitalise on the value of integrated corporate reporting, so the reporting model is evolving.

So how can technology help the demand for more detailed corporate reports? And how is this demand driving change in technology?

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XBRL IMPLEMENTATION

XBRL has been the subject of heated discussion among finance and technology departments for quite some time. However, it still largely remains the case that while many organisations are talking about it, very few are actually implementing it.

Indeed, the current low levels of take-up are somewhat shocking.

From our experience, there are a few factors involved in frustrating the deployment of XBRL. While it undoubtedly has the potential to deliver the benefits of faster and easier exchange of information across organisations, many businesses have not embraced the standard because they have seen that XML suffices for internal communication, and there is no compelling reason to move to XBRL. The regulation timetable hasn’t helped, either. Businesses don’t like moving timetables, and as the current delays on Insolvency II and other shifted deadlines have shown, this has left businesses reluctant to commit, as they have little idea if or when the standard will be mandatory, as applied to their business.

Against such a backdrop, an XBRL implementation is seen as a burden, with the cost adding no value to senior management.

Some companies recognise that, at its best, XBRL can be a real facilitator of faster information exchange, but they also realise that that value depends on uptake, and no one wants to lead the charge. This does not, however, preclude XBRL from being a major request in most requests for information, so it may be that the situation is changing.

In the interim, the presence of multiple standards, such as XBRL and iXBRL, seems to have given the impression of a disjointed plan. Consequently, there is little urgency and a perception of little benefit, despite the fact that in the interim, companies must embrace labour intensive, risk-prone processes of translating one set of reports into another by manually inputting them into spreadsheets.

VISUAL DATA AND MOBILE

The demand for more narrative-based data in reports is driving a rapid revolution in reporting. The addition of text to spreadsheets crammed full of numbers has already evolved into a keen focus on scorecards and dashboards, with a great deal of visual representations of data that provide context and analysis. This has itself undergone a rapid evolution from simple pie charts or bar graphs to waterfall charts and other visualisations.

This increase in the inclusion of data in modern reporting has created the situation of visual and narrative reports being better able to identify the causes and chains of events that show up as changes in financial information.

Getting this holistic information to executives wherever they are, in a way that enables them to act on the information rapidly, is a key driver for the interest in mobile technology. The advent of the tablet has already suggested many possible benefits. First, the size of screen, from seven to ten inches, has rapidly solved the issues that plagued early adopters of mobile phone-based working.

Combined with the graphic display of visual information, pinch and zoom capabilities on touchscreens offer an intuitive way to explore data. Integration with back office systems means that all an executive needs to do is to touch a graph and the background, and then contextual data and reports can be found quickly. Action can then be taken to remedy the issue at hand.

Looking to the future, new networking technologies such as 4G means that the

connection to the network and systems can remain permanent, enabling systems such as Infor10 ION Pulse to track jobs to completion and alert relevant executives in real time if there is an issue.

All of this is typically faster than with the conventional laptop. The speed and immediacy of information and reporting that is enabled by the device is going to be a critical advantage for those companies looking to compete on speed.

At present, this technology remains the province of senior executives, or those whose roles demand both travel and access to business critical systems – usually sales.

Cost remains the main barrier, though it is interesting to note that it is the cost of hardware and connectivity, as opposed to the software, which is often free in its mobile form.

As such, we expect rapid pick-up as the cost of devices comes down and heavy-duty connectivity packages become commoditised to take advantage of the nascent market.

The driver for this clarity and the need for ever more included data is, of course, the tougher business climate, as businesses look to get the most out of the assets they have invested in, in terms of the performance management and reporting software.

For example, some reporting now features business sales analysis, pinpointing not only the most profitable customers or products, but also revealing that customers or products previously thought to be star performers might actually be costing the business money. Amid a recession, the insight of such reporting drives a real increase in the interest in performance management software.

Modern corporate reporting – and the use of those reports by senior executives – is driving a great deal of technology change.

While certain demands remain constant – accurate, insightful information – the need for speed and a demand for certainty have now taken equal importance. As the comparison of XBRL and mobile shows, some of these areas are lagging while others lead.

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Phil Sheridan, managing director, Robert Half UK, extols the benefits of salary benchmarking in today’s job market

The finance growth challenge

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

MOST POPULAR BENEFITS TO REWARD & RETAIN EMPLOYEES 0%

50%

Pension contribution Flexible work hours or telecommuting Car allowance/company car Health care and/or life benefits Mobile/laptop Mentoring programmes Subsidised training/education Loyalty leave/sabbaticals Subsidised transportation Source: Robert Half Survey of 200 UK HR directors (2012)

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gainst a backdrop of a slower than anticipated economic recovery, the general UK hiring climate has not gained the momentum that many had hoped for. Organisations are therefore faced with a finance growth challenge, where teams are tasked to do more with less and hiring activity has not kept pace with increasing workloads. While some UK organisations are recruiting additional talent to support existing workloads and new growth opportunities, others lack the revenue growth necessary to warrant headcount increases, and say that a lack of access to credit and working capital is preventing them from hiring the requisite talent needed to commit to new ventures or expand current operations.

What is obvious is that where an upswing occurs, it is disproportionate among industries, regions and/or professions, and that pockets of opportunity still exist throughout the UK. Every employee is unique, and what is most important to one may not be important to the next. Still,

offering competitive remuneration and benchmarking against companies of similar size or industry can help attract, recruit and retain the best financial professionals who, in turn, will help your organisation grow.

When CFOs were asked about remuneration of existing employees, one in four (27 per cent) thought that base salaries would increase for employees and half (51 per cent) thought they would remain stagnant.

Unfortunately, the remaining 22 per cent actually thought that salaries would decrease within their accounting and finance departments. For those who plan to increase wages, the average pay rise is forecast at 6.89 per cent, nearly four points higher than at the beginning of 2012.

Determining competitive remuneration packages that meet organisational goals and budgets, as well as employee demands, can be challenging. Having the right information and tools to benchmark salaries against other organisations can make a significant difference, especially in today’s environment, where the most highly-sought after candidates have plenty of options.

Robert Half has just published its 2013 Salary Guides, focusing on accounting and finance recruitment within commerce and industry, as well as financial services.

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Recipes for success

Stephen Ford, CFO of Optum International, Katrina Nurse, FD at Topshop/Topman, and Narasimhan Narayanan, CFO at Coates, share their views on the skills and competencies that make for a successful career in today’s finance function

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STEPHEN FORD

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CFO, Optum International y own finance career has taken in many aspects of the finance role. In a 23-year finance career I have been a CFO six times across companies of different sizes, including blue-chip organisations. I spent five years in mergers and acquisitions, having grown, turned around and restructured businesses. I have worked and been based in the UK, Europe, the US, Japan, Asia and Russia.

What’s very clear today is that what people are looking for is true business partners, because that is what you need to be when you reach the CFO role – more involved commercially, more involved operationally and more involved with the brand. It is assumed you can do the technical role and what you need to demonstrate is the broader skills set. Companies are looking at whether you can be ‘trusted’ as an adviser, so that when the CEO comes in with a slightly crazy idea you don’t just say ‘no’, you look for a way to tweak it and you are strong enough to stand up to them.

Just keeping score is not going to get you an FD or CFO job any more, and that goes for private businesses as well as listed businesses. Companies also want people with international exposure today. I don’t necessarily think it is essential to live overseas or to have the language skills, but you do need exposure. That said, if you are offered an international assignment then you should take it because there is a lot of competition and it will add something. Companies want to know if you have seen things from different perspectives and that you have depth in your understanding.

What I also expect of all the people who work for me

is the ability to build one-on-one relations with the other functions within the business, whether sales, marketing, HR or whoever. I am a firm believer that commercial finance is becoming more important, and that means managing revenue through to margin. The way to give people exposure to that is through projects and cross-fertilisation. You cannot be a successful senior finance professional without having done a controllership job and a financial analysis job.

Many companies feel the way to help current employees develop these skills and gain these experiences is through mentoring. Some companies are good and others are not so good at that. I have been a formal mentor of people and I am still in contact with those people, and what has been successful there is that they are from different parts of the business. As a mentor, you want to offer a different perspective and share knowledge from a different angle. For me, the strength in mentoring is building a good network through which people can call on certain people for advice around certain issues.

In terms of the core competencies required for a successful career in finance today, I am looking for three things in people. One is technical ability. That doesn’t mean knowing the technical details of tax, but being able to talk debits and credits. You have to have that. The second thing you have to have is communication skills – both up and down the hierarchy of the company, because that is how you earn respect and gain a seat at the top table. The third trait is the people skills. You have to want your team to follow you and that means earning respect from them.

‘Just keeping score is not going to get you an FD or CFO job any more’

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Stephen Ford Ford is the CFO of Optum Health, and was previously with Alliance Boots, General Electric and GE Plastics.

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

KATRINA NURSE

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FD at Topshop/Topman, part of Arcadia Group

am Arcadia “home-grown”, having joined as an A-level trainee from school and going through their in-house development programme. I have worked in many roles across a variety of the group’s brands over the past 20-plus years, so have seen how the demands on the finance function have changed in both the same company and industry in that time Being a successful finance professional today requires commercial flair and thinking, and acting like a business owner, as well as the more straightforward understanding and interpretation of the numbers. Understanding what’s important to the business and being intuitive about what’s right is key, and it’s critical that the finance function is involved in projects from the outset, rather than just at the end.

During my time with Arcadia I have noted that other functions are most receptive to the contribution of finance when we share the enthusiasm and passion for what we are about, and appear to be in tune with what they are doing and thinking. In creative industries, such as retail and fashion, departments will often want to act on instinct and intuition. It’s through our understanding of this that we can offer the robust financial arguments to support them and move things forward. That’s why when we bring people in, we are also looking to see whether they have a genuine passion for our industry and brands.

While much can be learned by an individual who has a natural curiosity for the business, I also help develop business partnering more formally by ensuring my finance team are exposed to other functions they would not normally interact with. I bring other areas, such as design or marketing, into our regular team meetings to present what they are currently working on and to give the team the opportunity to ask questions about their roles and the challenges they face.

The need to understand the broader business is a two-way process and I have noticed an increased interest in other functional managers wanting to understand

more about the financial aspects of the business. Today’s finance professional needs to be able to take finance jargon and translate it into a compelling, easy-to-understand and engaging story. I have noted that this has had extremely positive effects on our internal reputation, and subsequently the business relationships we have.

Over the course of my career I have been fortunate to benefit from coaching when I have needed it, so I would certainly recommend that people on their way up make use of that if offered. This has tended to happen at times of great change for me, usually a big step up in my career, but also when I returned from maternity leave and was wrestling with the career versus mother challenges.

We also offer mentoring within Arcadia, usually aimed at the emerging finance stars. Those with the potential for senior management status are each assigned a finance director who they would not normally deal with as their mentor. A number of those I have mentored have gone on to become FDs, and I am now being asked to mentor other executives from different parts of the business, which gives them the added benefit of increased financial awareness.

In summary, our finance managers and directors of the future need to demonstrate a strong passion and enthusiasm for our industry, an innate curiosity for what makes the business work, and resilience.

The speed of change in fashion retailing generally, as well as technological advancement, is hugely demanding of the finance professional today. There is so much information to digest and the need to react and move quickly has never been more paramount than these past few years, when UK retailing has experienced difficult trading times.

Although I have been with the same organisation for more than 20 years and based in the same country, I’m not sure if I was starting out now whether I would be able to achieve the same end point. The growth potential in the global market place is where most businesses are now looking.

‘The need to understand the broader business is two-way’ Katrina Nurse Nurse has held a variety of roles over a 20-plus year career with Arcadia Group and is currently FD at Topshop/Topman.

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

NARASIMHAN NARAYANAN

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Global CFO, Industrial Division, Coates Plc he expectations of the finance function today are certainly rising. In the past ten years or so, the number of scandals and unpredicted major businesses developments and issues has increased a great deal so the role of finance – which is at the heart of protecting against these and at the centre of key business decisions – is evermore important.

Finance now has to be on top of controllership, big on trusted business partnering, and take the lead on compliance and regulatory issues. It is certainly the hot seat compared with what it was before.

We can no longer be just a back office person waiting for an invitation to get involved with other parts of the business. Finance has to be taking the lead in many areas of the business rather than waiting to be asked.

It is a far more proactive role than it was in the past. To fulfil these roles, we need a broader skills set.

In my career I have always reached out and tried to get myself a seat at the table rather than waiting to be invited. I have always been keen to put my hand up and put forward a recommendation or indeed put forward a justification for an idea. That has come partly from organisations I worked for that saw the finance function as important and valuable.

Today, you must be able to tell the finance story and bring the numbers to life. Increasingly you see so much focus on cost and a questioning of what value the finance function plays. In this context it is important to show our value by supporting the profitable growth agenda of the business. We need to have the skills to communicate effectively.

For me, gaining the knowledge required to be a successful finance professional today requires experiencing first-hand the role of other parts of the business and also moving around sectors. That doesn’t necessarily mean moving out of a finance role or away from your organisation.

Getting involved with project teams – which work across functions or in partnership with other companies – can give you great exposure. Either way, sitting in our rooms and just doing our jobs isn’t going to be enough anymore.

Similarly, if you really want to reach the top, I would recommend you gain overseas experience.

In my current role I am a ‘global’ CFO, and it is very hard to do that effectively if you have not been exposed to other cultures, cultural sensitivity, work experience in other countries and building effective relationships.

This feature is part of the CFO Priorities programme, which includes articles, papers and interviews.

Supported by Robert Half. www.cimaglobal.com/priorities.

‘I have always reached out to get myself a seat at the table’ Narasimhan Narayanan Narayanan is global CFO at Coates, which is part of the Sun Chemical Group.

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Malaysia’s moment BPO and offshoring continue to prosper and one region in particular is growing considerably as a location of choice for finance

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series of events held in London recently has highlighted the benefits to organisations of joining a growing trend to outsource aspects of their finance function to Malaysia.

Sponsored by Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the Malaysian government’s development agency, which works to raise awareness of the country’s growing offshore services and business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, a breakfast panel discussion heard that, despite the tough economic climate and organisations being increasingly conscious of their spend, globally the worldwide offshore and BPO market is flourishing.

An IDC report entitled “Offshore Outsourcing Service Trends – A Malaysian Perspective”, upon which the event was based, claims that the global BPO market will continue to grow in coming years – from US$147bn in 2010 to an estimated US$191bn in 2015. Meanwhile, it says the worldwide finance and accounting (F&A) services market will grow from US$27bn to US$38bn over the same period.

“In recent years we have seen an

increased acceptance of offshoring as an option for BPO, particularly as offshore providers have invested in offering higher-value services, local capabilities, and higher-level skills,” delegates heard.

In the context of the “new normal”, one that is characterised by global economic and business uncertainty, businesses are looking for ways to deal with a slew of challenges, ranging from controlling costs, competing more effectively, extending reach into new markets and being quicker at introducing new products and services to the market, the report adds.

Undertaking multiple initiatives to address these challenges is a daunting task and, as such, the C-Suite agenda is focused on building a globally successful and sustainable organisation with a culture that is intrinsically based on innovation and customer centricity.

Simultaneously, there is a need to enhance shareholder value by clocking in robust financial results.

STEPPING UP TO THE CHALLENGE

Addressing these issues means businesses are increasingly looking to build a robust global delivery and sourcing network that enables them to gain access to top talent and de-risk delivery capabilities.

Given these challenges, the report stated, the service providers that continue

to offer the cost arbitrage proposition will not succeed in coming years – as increasing cost of delivery and price pressures from clients will slowly eliminate margins to an unsustainable level. And, according to the findings of the study, this is putting Malaysia in the driving seat when it comes to offshore shared-services locations.

Malaysian service providers are building collaborative delivery models and strengthening their industry-specific capabilities to offer more business-aligned models. They are focusing on building a relationship and an understanding with clients, and thereby building a sustainable engagement model.

In addition, there are valuable government incentives and policies, there is access to modern infrastructure, an excellent talent pool, and information and communications technology skills and resources are readily available.

While cost is still a key evaluation metric for Malaysia, the report shows these other parameters are increasingly relevant. As such, the F&A BPO services market in Malaysia is expected to grow from US$537m this year to US$997m in 2016 – with a compound annual growth rate of 13.1 per cent.

In the Asia Pacific region, the market share for Malaysia is expected to increase from 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the same

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‘Many companies start with transactional functions then move others later’

period – making it one of the fastestgrowing markets in the region. F&A services already account for 54 per cent of total BPO services spending in Malaysia, and are expected to maintain similar levels through to 2016. The panel discussion saw presentations from a host of organisations that have outsourced parts of their finance functions to Malaysia.

Alan Brooks, migration programme manager at Shell; Gary Jeffery, partner and director, UK operations, Frost & Sullivan; and a representative from BP described how their businesses have managed the transition, while Michael Warren, director of global sourcing, MDeC, explained the benefits from his point of view. Later, the panel was joined by Carlos Medina, senior VP – strategy, at Experian.

The representatives from Shell, BP and Frost & Sullivan all talked about their experiences of offshoring financial and accounting services to Malaysia.

Shell has located a major business service centre in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where it employs more than 3,000 people engaged in providing finance, HR, customer service, contracting and procurement, and IT services. BP employs 600 people in Malaysia providing accounting and financial business process services, plus tax support and IT. Frost &

Sullivan has been operating in Malaysia for nearly two decades, and Jeffery spoke of how the region has grown as a BPO provider.

BRINGING THE DISCUSSION TO THE TABLE

Following the panel discussion, a roundtable dinner was held in London to consider the issues facing organisations looking to embark on finance offshoring.

Bringing together 12 CFOs and finance leaders from a range of industries and sectors, the event, hosted by CIMA CFO John Windle, heard that shared services provides companies with a form of transparency and gives the CEO the confidence that the business is controlling finance costs. However, it also heard that there are other benefits too, from the opportunity to standardise processes to re-focusing resource savings into other areas of the business.

However, attendees said that challenges remain in moving aspects of their finance functions offshore.

“The question for me is around where it leaves the finance function’s integrity in the long run,” said one participant. “What happens to the finance function integrity and the role it plays as a strategic commercial partner to the overall business?”

Some participants agreed that, with this in mind, some aspects of the finance function lend themselves better to outsourcing than others.

“I can see it’s very easy to outsource transaction functions,” said one, “but if you’re talking about the decision-making criteria, treasury functions and those kinds of more ‘thoughtful processes’, personally I would be concerned.”

However, there was agreement around the table that outsourcing to offshore locations was appealing, and something all major organisations are looking at on an ongoing basis.

MDeC’s Warren said many companies start off with some transactional functions then move others later.“Some organisations start putting their call centre into a captive centre, and very much owning it,” he said.

“Then they move up to IT, move up to HR, move up to finance and move up to knowledge process outsourcing, which is the real key stuff, and do that via noncaptives.

“That can be a very reassuring way for some companies, and is a way for them to ensure they embark on this valuable road without feeling completely overwhelmed. Because the benefits are clear.”

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EVENTS

The Bank of England’s view of the British economy for 2012

Role of the finance director in a multimillion pound infrastructure project

Tax update and topical issues – in partnership with AAT

3 October 2012 Milton Keynes

4 October 2012 London

9 October 2012 Stoke-on-Trent

This event will review the Bank of England’s latest economic forecasts from its recently published inflation report. It will also cover the outlook for GDP growth, as well as CPI inflation.

Crossrail is the largest addition to the south east rail network in 50 years, and is due to be completed by 2018. This event will see Crossrail’s finance director explain his role in the project and the challenges he has faced.

The event will cover recent developments in charity law, ensuring that you can apply these developments in daily practice and be able to discuss the changes with your clients in an informed way.

www.cimaglobal.com/ EastMidlandsandEastAnglia

www.cimaglobal.com/ centrallondonandnorththames

www.cimaglobal.com/westmidlands

Further events Executive CPD Academy 18-19 October This event focuses on the strategic side of finance and has been designed to update senior executives with the skills and knowledge needed in seven key areas.

The two-day event will help to meet annual CPD requirements, as well as provide an opportunity to network with peers. www.cimaglobal.com/executive

What the heck is social media: how can it help you grow your business?

13 November This event will show how you can use social media to help grow your business, with case studies from companies that are currently using social media to help drive future growth. www.cimaglobal.com/ westmidlands

CIMA CPD Winter Academy 3-4 December This two-day event is designed to help finance professionals maximise their CPD learning in a convenient and cost-effective format.

It will cover a variety of topics that are relevant to management accountants, as well as providing an opportunity to network. www.cimaglobal.com/winter

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

NEXT TIME THE

STRATEG IC P E R FO R M AN CE MA NAG E M E N T ISSUE

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From measuring performance, to strategic approaches to performance management and performance incentives, our December edition of Excellence in Leadership will include comment from a host of global CFOs and other senior finance professionals.

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Excellence in Leadership | Issue 3, 2012

CIMA offices CIMA Corporate Centre 26 Chapter Street, London SW1P 4NP Tel: +44 (0) 20 8849 2251 Email: cima.contact @cimaglobal.com www.cimaglobal.com

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Email: russia @cimaglobal.com

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