At many organizations today, CFOs strive to provide more frequent and accurate financial forecasts, while juggling increasingly complex economic and regulatory environments. An article on CFO.com explains that “big data” can help organizations manage complexity and drive growth by identifying strategic opportunities, improving operational efficiency, and ensuring compliance.
At the ground level, CFOs need to be able to view trends and analyze their organizations’ expense spending using expense management software. From there, a robust analytics platform can link this enterprise data to constantly changing external information sources, allowing managers to generate compelling and actionable reports, preferably without intervention from technical staff.
CFO.com suggests three ways in which these analytics tools can drive growth.
- Identify strategic opportunities. Analytics insights can help CFOs spot opportunities in new markets and leverage savings through collaborations and preferred vendor relationships.
- Improve operational efficiency. Operations are hardly static; they must constantly evolve to keep pace with changing marketplace and regulatory factors. A good analytics platform can help financial executives adjust to the latest data by providing access to multidimensional sources, integrating them with more than 300 other enterprise-information sources, and making it easy to create dashboards and reports in a variety of formats.
- Ensure compliance. Many organizations face serious risks if they fail to keep up with changing compliance requirements. Using automated systems like Chrome River’s expense management software can reduce complexity and limit the risks of noncompliance.
In the end, according to CFO.com, “big data” is best used to solve problems relevant to your organization, asking and answering specific questions to generate adaptive predictions and reliable insights. By delivering specific, timely and accurate data like business expense reports, “big data” can contribute to fast, effective decision-making and smooth day-to-day operations.
We appreciate hearing from our readers! What advice would you offer for keeping a “big data” project focused on driving growth? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
Source: CFO.com, June 2013
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