Chrome River CURRENTS

It’s natural for most of us to want to do things better. We want to be better managers, better co-workers, better employees and, in general, better people. Unfortunately, it’s also just as easy for us to get lost in the hassle of daily life and simply waste time. As any executive knows - time is money. The less your department or team procrastinates, the more productive your organization will be and the more it will benefit. Whether it’s making sure each employee enters data accurately into your expense management software or delivers the weekly report your client needs - here are some surefire ways to curb procrastination and increase efficiency. 

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. 

Mobile solutions have become critical in integrating business and technology. If designed and executed effectively, they have the ability to speed productivity, simplify the user experience, and offer added convenience to end users. However, just adding mobile isn't going to do much by itself. You need to develop a mobile mindset, thinking about how innovative mobile solutions will enhance your business model at every level of your organization without causing disruptions and distractions.

Let’s face it; even though the concept of company-wide financial transparency was introduced more than two decades ago, not all executives are ready to open the books for all employees. More forward-thinking executives, ones who embrace data, feel an open-book management strategy boosts employee engagement and can generate higher profits.

What keeps a CFO awake at night and prevents them from getting a good night’s sleep? Certainly, CFOs have a lot of issues and stresses to deal with. A recent study compiled a list of the biggest issues facing today's CFO. Addressing these issues appropriately can help propel a company into a higher earnings bracket and relieve upper management stresses.

The buzzword floating around companies and their IT departments today is Big Data. The predominant thinking is that there is value in ‘data’ and companies should store as much data as possible. Accordingly, many firms now save almost all their data for data mining purposes. Frankly, this approach is at the least unnecessary and at the most overkill.

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.

Massive data breaches affecting global companies like Sony, Neiman-Marcus and Target have solidified the unsettling fact that even huge mega companies cannot always prevent compromises in customer and company data.

Too often, CFOs spend so much time focusing on the daily requirements of their specific employment activities that they lose sight of their long-term career goals. Although they definitely need to devote time and energy to their current employer, they also need to invest in their own personal future career. They do not want to be caught suddenly looking for another job when they have not prepared for that eventuality.

Our world is producing data at an unprecedented rate. More impressive than the simple generation of data is the fact that the data can be stored, accessed, manipulated, analyzed, and applied. With this proliferation of big data comes the ability to use it; any business that fails to take advantage of the plethora of available data is setting itself up to lose out on valuable insights.