CFOs: Rising to the Challenge of Performance Management

In 2003, 450 CFOs from 35 countries were surveyed for the IBM Business Consulting Services Global CFO Survey. CFOs: Rising to the Challenge of Performance Management analyses the survey findings in relation to business performance management and its impact on the CFO.

In ranking “improving performance management” as the top opportunity and challenge, the surveyed CFOs underscored the importance of business performance management. The survey indicates that this trend appears set to continue over the next three years: CFOs expect their workload to undergo a 16 percent drop in transactional activities and a 13 percent rise in decision support and business performance management activities.

The goal of performance management is to enable organisations to make better decisions faster.

Better decisions in this context refer to fact-based decisions which lead to better company results. The company thus becomes more adaptive, better able to sense and respond to change and ultimately more competitive.

In order achieve this, the survey illustrates that access to company information, both financial and non-financial, as well as to past and predictive performance data, are key to effective monitoring of corporate performance and decision making.

Although more than 70 percent of surveyed CFOs view information as a major asset, fewer than a third of then were confident that their information frameworks are highly effective across the business. Coupled with this, roughly two thirds of CFOs believe that information is not tailored, cost-effective, easy to use or integrated across the organisation.

To overcome these challenges, the paper details the five key attributes of a successful blueprint for business performance:

1. It is enterprise-wide in scope and impact
2. It incorporates non-financial and financial key performance management
3. It is “right time” and predictive in nature
4. It includes integrated analytics
5. It delivers role-based decision support information tightly aligned with the workflow of key decision makers.

Thus, the close integration of processes, people, technology and information are shown to be key in building a successful business performance management architecture that will enable CFOs to meet this new challenge.

To obtain a copy of this publication or to speak to someone about how IBM Business Consulting Services can help your organisation tackle these challenges, please contact our Financial Management team.