Chrome River CURRENTS

Whether you’re a CFO or CEO, IT is likely a foundation of your business. And whether it’s for order management or expense management infrastructure or software, you’ll need a continued focus on IT in 2015. Here are 3 certainties in the IT landscape that you will need to address with your IT department.

With the convergence of Big Data, the Internet of Things and the quest for analytics from different departments, CIOs are being forced into the additional role of coordinating the various data experiments occurring at any given time in an organization. 

Predictive analytics, or the sifting through of company data in order to highlight important patterns to make predictions and better decisions, is currently a hot topic in the business world. Advocates believe this approach holds great potential especially with a recent report from Nucleus Research suggesting that predictive analytics helped Mueller Inc. obtain a 248 percent ROI on new packaging equipment after investing in and using IBM's SPSS Modeler technology.

Carrying out an impeccable job as CFO is crucial to the well-being of your company. As CFO, your main duties include managing risk and analyzing your company’s finances. Your analyses and recommendations guide the company, and inappropriate suggestions based on analysis of inaccurate or delayed data can be disastrous for your company, and could lead to taking on undue risk or making poor budgeting decisions. Timely and correct data are essential for your job, but you may need to take some steps to ensure that you get the data you need whether you are analyzing the numbers from within your division or from a different or remote department or partner company.

Is visualization the key to proper use of big data? Bar charts, treemaps, scatter plots – these are all visualization tools that put data into perspective, but do they drive the point home for those looking to extract meaningful information? The answer is to create a multidimensional view of the data that is more intuitive. This approach is Interactive Visualization.

Traditionally, CFOs and their finance teams stayed narrowly in the arena of management. They strategically employed data-driven analytics to manage the business from the upper levels. As the ability to collect and analyze data has exponentially expanded, CFOs are increasingly in a position to aid their organizations in improving profitability and efficiency and more granular levels.

Analytics platforms are essential tools in today’s organizations. Business leaders rely on them to facilitate fast, effective decision-making, while operations managers use such tools to deliver smooth execution of day-to-day processes. But it’s a mistake to think of analytics software as some kind of magic bullet.

For the last five years, IBM has issued reports on the changing roles of analytics and “big data” in business. In its latest report, “Analytics: A Blueprint for Value,” IBM surveyed 1,000 executives in IT and business from 70 countries. According to online industry magazine CMSWire.com, this latest research shows that while “big data” and analytics can drive new revenue and customers, most organizations are dragging their feet.