Posted by Tom Kelly, Senior Director of Product Marketing
CFOs today face several ever-evolving challenges. Digital disruption continues to change the way business gets done everywhere from self-driving cars to closing the books. Additionally, businesses embracing hybrid business models that are bridging the internet-brick and mortar gap need to experiment and innovate without spending significant amounts of capital and resources. Meanwhile, globalization demands that companies comply with local laws and accounting requirements while simultaneously managing operations in each country. And, as if all of this is not enough, regulatory burdens continue to grow and the CFO still needs to hit the quarterly numbers.
In order to be successful in this ever changing, chaotic business environment it is essential that a CFO:
Lead by Focusing Resources on What Matters Most
No one is better positioned to help the organization concentrate on priorities. It is the CFO that leads the planning process, establishing the goals and how funds will be invested each year. Business acumen and expertise are important skills for a CFO to be able to focus the organization on key deliverables, but just as importantly the CFO needs a scalable infrastructure that can provide a single source of truth and actionable business intelligence. Combining business acumen and expertise with NetSuite’s unified data model, the CFO can deliver on actionable business intelligence across the entire enterprise by putting real-time data in the hands of the decision makers, on any device, at any time.
If the new model is successful, and the business grows continuously, the CFO needs to be wary of interrupting business momentum when the need to scale demands a new system and infrastructure. That’s where cloud platforms can future proof the business to scale, adapt and evolve. More importantly, multi-tenant cloud platforms ensure that customizations are carried forward and innovation is always current.
Transform Proactively and Reactively
The best way a CFO can make sure that the organization thrives is to put in place a flexible infrastructure that can react to an ever-changing environment. Today’s CFOs need a platform that does not compromise between scalability and control. As competitors innovate offering new products and/or services and new business models arise CFOs will need not only the functionality to deal with emerging challenges such as recurring billing but also a flexible platform to test and trial on newly emerging business models. In retail for example, businesses need a platform to test and configure a seamless shopping experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, or in a bricks and mortar store.
As business goes global, the CFO has to facilitate the transformation of multi-currency, multi-lingual, multi-book and different statutory requirements with efficiency. Failure to do so can result in degrading a company’s operational consistency, controls and visibility into foreign operations. Companies that have very large, rigid headquarters systems that cannot be quickly deployed forgoes the effort and the result is less visibility, less operational consistency and control. In these situations, the goal of maintaining one version of the truth is unobtainable.
Operate the Finance Function Effectively and Efficiently
While leading and transforming, the CFO has another thing to do – run the finance function in an effective an efficient manner. In some cases, this can be more demanding than anything else a CFO does, but it must be done, and done very well. With the ever-increasing amount of regulations, tax laws that are local, state, national and international, maintaining strong internal controls and corporate governance, and reporting information that is accurate, actionable and readily available can be enough of a challenge by themselves. Embracing the right software platform can make managing this menagerie simple.
Today’s CFOs should look at software companies that have considerable experience with organizations across industries, that can use that experience to ensure that best practices for things like corporate governance and controls are baked into the standard offerings. It is also important to get the information into the hands of decision makers in a timely and accurate manner. The standard approach of generating reports is (often through Excel spreadsheets) is no longer sufficient. CFOs need a system that puts actionable business intelligence and alerts in the hands of decision makers in real-time via mobile devices.
Are You an Old Version CFO?
Gone are the days of the Bean Counter! New regulations, new business models, the advent of big data, and exponential technology improvements requires that the CFO handle broader responsibilities beyond effectively and efficiently operating the finance function. Financial acumen is a must for today’s CFOs, but they must also possess strategic skills to help transform the organization and be able to have operational insight to lead. Using the old heavy rigid ERP offerings will not provide the tools to be nimble and break out of the “Old CFO’ mold.
Learn more about how NetSuite makes a CFO’s job easier, more strategic.
People will honestly ask “Does that poor person deserve food?” but never ask “Does that CEO deserve ten cars, three houses, and two yachts?”
And before you respond with “the poor person is buying that food with someone else’s money”, the CEO bought those luxuries with money earned from other people’s hard work.
Not all expert interviews are created equal. Here are the five most popular Big Data experts we’re spoken to this year. Did your favorite make the list?
As the founder and president of the International School of Engineering, aka INSOFE (@INSOFEedu), Kolluru could teach his own master class in communicating complex ideas with clarity and excitement.
Kolluru has done extensive work in data science, particularly mathematical algorithms and pattern extraction. He has helped establish several data science centers of excellence, and proactively steered INSOFE into the globally acclaimed School of Applied Engineering that it is today.
We asked him about the use of data science skills in the workplace, and where the field of data analytics was headed.
See what he had to say about Data Science and Big Data Analytics
Eckerson (@weckerson), the founder and principal consultant for Eckerson Group, is an internationally recognized thought leader in the business intelligence. He is a sought-after consultant, noted speaker and bestselling author.
In our interview, Eckerson offers insight on the evolution of business analytics with additional thoughts on what business intelligence professionals will need to do survive the future of self-service technology.
Read his interview for more on the Evolution of Business Intelligence
Xin (@rxin) is the chief architect for Spark core at Databricks, and also one of Spark’s founding fathers. At this year’s Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, he gave a presentation on the full history of Spark, from taking inspiration from mainframe databases to the cutting edge features of Spark 2.x.
Syncsort’s Paige Roberts sat down with Xin to get the details on the driving factors behind Spark 2.x and its newest features, such as structured streaming.
Follow along in his popular two-part series:
Narkhede (@nehanarkhede) is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Confluent. Prior to Confluent, she built Apache Kafka with two of her colleagues at LinkedIn.
At a recent Confluent partner event, Syncsort’s Paige Roberts spoke with Narkhede about Apache Kafka, Confluent, the future of streaming data processing, and what it’s like to be a “Girl Boss” in Big Data.
You won’t want to miss any of this three-part conversation:
Corace is the executive vice president of digital disruption at SoftServe, a digital solutions company. As a seasoned industry professional with more than 25 years of experience leading sales and implementation teams, technology groups and global delivery centers, Corace is an expert in digital and technology enablement, digital transformation, digital disruption and digital futurism.
We checked in with Robert to get his insight on Big Data and current trends and challenges in data and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Check out his two-part interview:
For additional words of wisdom from Big Data experts, download our free eBook: Bringing Big Data to Life: What the Experts Say
Retailers have been focusing on technologies to measure and assess customer response, and have been using the data they produce to drive e-commerce decisions, suggests a study of 136 enterprise retailers at the 2017 eTail West Conference held earlier this year.
Enterprise retailers with at least US$ 500 million in annual revenues participated in the study, which was a joint effort of Adam Software, an
Aprimo company; WBR Digital; and ChannelAdvisor.
Multichannel enterprise retailers comprised 81 percent of respondents, pure-play online retailers 11 percent, in-store-only retailers 4 percent, and other types of companies the remaining 4 percent.
Enterprise retailers have been implementing customer experience strategies across multiple channels, the researchers found. They have been seeking out intelligent data solutions to obtain a 360-degree view of customers across multiple channels and marketplaces.
“Digital retailers are likely to have reversed the classic stock focus on having goods to sell as the business model, to building a base of loyal customers they assist in buying what they need,” observed Andy Mulholland, principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“A digital retailer acts more as a personal shopper using intelligence to make every aspect of your buying activity feel right,” he told CRM Buyer.
The top four spends for retailers, according to the study, are the following:
Social media was the highest spending priority for only 3 percent of retailers and the second-highest for just 14 percent.
Social media is “rarely the leading channel in a marketing strategy,” noted Jeffery Parrish, Aprimo’s director for retail and consumer goods.
“Because many retailers are focusing marketing investment in digital channels, social media 
is a very prominent channel and component of the typical retail marketing mix,” he told CRM Buyer. “Investment in social media management, technology, and social media influencers make it understandable that this would be a top four channel of investment.”
Retailers spent the least on channels through which data can neither be significantly acquired or applied — such as direct mail, radio and TV, print ads, trade shows and events.
Retailers have been redesigning their online buying experiences to accommodate a multichannel strategy, the study found.
However, 46 percent of the retailers surveyed across channels considered their performance only average.
“Each retailer has their own marketing mix with winning channels, and many retailers struggle to find equal levels of success across channels,” Parrish explained. “This perspective is largely due to the difficulty for retailers to adopt multi-attribution models.”
Consumers are moving toward making online purchases via mobile devices, but only 33 percent of enterprise retailers considered their mobile app performance above average or excellent; another 37 percent considered it below average or poor.
One company attempting to remedy the problem is
Curalate, which on Thursday released Curalate Showroom, a tool that lets companies make their social media channels shoppable on mobile.
Curalate’s platform lets companies tag any image or video to create a Showroom, posting the link to any marketing channel selected.
Curalate’s algorithm creates a feed of recommended products for consumers to browse.
The goal is to effect “a major jump in time on site and a big drop in bounce rate as consumers engage more and stay on site longer,” Luke Butler, Curalate’s manager of strategy and operations, told CRM Buyer.
The retailers surveyed sought to personalize the customer experience — but that is easier said than done.
“Generally, when marketers just dabble with personalization they run into issues because they’re not using good enough data,” said Andy Zimmerman, CMO at
Evergage.
“With deeper, better data and machine-learning-driven affinity modeling, marketers can be much more effective at driving 1:1 relevant experiences that truly engage visitors,” he told CRM Buyer.
Many marketers are getting more funds for personalization, said Zimmerman, because it’s “an investment that can be justified with quantitative analysis and intuitive logic.”
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.
Check out the excellent, new online course by Peter Myers and Chris Randall for Microsoft Learning Experiences (LeX). Lean how to develop multidimensional data models with SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services. The complete course is available on edX at no cost to audit, or you can highlight your new knowledge and skills with a Verified Certificate for a small charge. Enrollment is available at edX.
I have this system of four nonlinear equations:
the unknowns are a1, a2, gamma1 and gamma 2. all other parameters are known. What I want is to plot the a1 vs sigma2 as below:
I tried findinstance but it takes a lot of time to find the results for any value of sigma2, Let alone plotting a1 for different values of sigma2!
Can anybody help me?
Thanks in advance
In a previous post, we noted that the majority of consumers who had a 7-year-old delinquency purged from their credit file saw improvements in their FICO® Scores. Now let’s look at whether these consumers’ credit-seeking behavior changed after the delinquency was purged and their score recovered. Were they more likely to apply for credit? Get approved and open new accounts?
To assess this, we looked at the proportion of the “delinquency purge” population (those that had a delinquency removed from their credit report between May 2016 and July 2016) that had a new inquiry or opened a new account in the three months following the purge window (August through October 2016).
In Figure 1, we compared those values to the same period a year earlier, to avoid capturing seasonal changes in credit habits.
The data showed that there was a minor increase in the percentage of consumers that had a new inquiry compared to a year prior, and a material increase in those that opened a new account. This is particularly noticeable for new bankcards.
For the “full recovery” population (those in the “delinquency purge” population who had no remaining serious delinquencies), the changes were slightly more pronounced, as seen in Figure 2.
We see a greater increase in both new inquiries and account openings for this segment than is observed in the broader “delinquency purge” population. Furthermore, we see higher rates of new account openings despite lower rates of inquiries than the “delinquency purge” population, suggesting a higher approval rate.
This supports the idea that these consumers, who have rebuilt their credit profile and FICO® Score through years of responsible behavior, are now very well-positioned to access new credit at more favorable terms than they would have been offered before (which in turn may induce them to take on new credit).
But perhaps the increase was due to other factors (such as less restrictive lending standards), and had nothing to do with the removed delinquencies. So we looked at the inquiry and new account activity for the “delinquency baseline” population (those who had a serious delinquency in 2009-2010 but did not have a delinquency removed between May 2016 and July 2016) as a benchmark for comparison.
In the “delinquency baseline” population, we found that there was actually a small decline in inquiries between 2015 and 2016, and relatively minor changes in new account openings. The figures look quite different from the increases in new credit activity seen in the “delinquency purge” population.
The difference in the year-over-year change in new inquiry rate between “delinquency purge” consumers and “delinquency baseline” consumers suggests an increase in the willingness of the “delinquency purge” population to seek credit, and increased confidence in their ability to get approved. And the data supports that confidence – the increase in new accounts opened is disproportionately large when compared to the increase in inquiries.
As we move further away from the Great Recession, consumers whose credit situation was adversely impacted but who have since righted the ship via responsible use of credit should continue to see marked improvements in their FICO® Score. Based on what we’ve observed from the “delinquency purge” population, their increased creditworthiness comes with expanded interest in and access to credit: a potential win-win for both lenders and consumers.
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Many Chinese companies have risen on the back of mobile advertising, but a new report says fraud is rampant in the sector.
Global ad revenue wasted on fraudulent traffic could reach $ 16.4 billion in 2017, according to information from AppLift China. AppLift conducted a twelve-week study and found out that certain app categories are more susceptible to fraud than others, with entertainment apps and news apps seeing the most fraud traffic.
Mobile app categories with the most fraudulent activity include entertainment, news, and education with 22%, 22% and 21%, respectively. Meanwhile the apps with the least fraudulent activity dealt with parenting and shopping with 2% and 3%, respectively. More complex and sophisticated types of fraud have evolved such as click injection and click stuffing.
“As a leader in the mobile ad space, we firmly believe it is our responsibility to not only focus our efforts on detecting and fighting ad fraud, but to also share our learnings with industry peers so that we can all better understand the risks and fight fraud together,” said Tim Koschella, CEO of AppLift.
