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TDWI Best Practices Reports

01/01/10

Forward-thinking finance departments have figured out how to transform themselves from back-office bookkeepers to strategic advisors by partnering with the business intelligence (BI) team.

TDWI's Best Practices Reports educate technical and business professionals about emerging issues in business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). These in-depth reports offer objective, vendor-neutral research consisting of interviews with practitioners and industry experts, as well as a survey of BI professionals worldwide. The reports are sponsored by vendors who collectively wish to evangelize a BI/DW discipline or emerging technology.

Current Report

Transforming Finance to Strategic Advisors

The finance department sits at the information nexus of the organization. It regularlycollects financial and non-financial data from every business unit and consolidates that informationinto summary and detailed management reports. Finance can therefore be a powerful agent oforganizational change. It can leverage the information that it collects to assist executives and line ofbusiness managers to optimize processes, achieve goals, avert problems, and make decisions.

However, most finance departments have yet to step up and advise the business in aproactive manner. Most are stuck playing a back office role: they are forced to spend too muchtime producing internal and statutory financial reports, which leaves little time to analyze data andcollaborate with business managers about how to improve the business. In the process of producingall these reports, finance teams create information silos, using spreadsheets and other low-cost tools,that interfere with top executives’ ability to obtain a consistent view of enterprise performance.

Forward-thinking finance departments have figured out how to transformthemselves from back-office bookkeepers to strategic advisors. They have learned to partner withthe IT department—more specifically, the business intelligence (BI) team—whose job is tomanage information and deliver a single version of corporate truth. In so doing, they have liberatedthemselves from manual data collection and report production processes so they can engage in morevalue-added activities.


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