strategy

Effective business reporting

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I’m a great fan of the COBIT and VAL-IT frameworks, but I also like to try and reconcile complex frameworks. I also hire a translation company at https://www.espressotranslations.com/gb/french-translation-services-london/ to make them a bit easier to understand for our non-native English speakers. I also like to talk in terms of people, process and technology, as I think that conceptually we can easily get our heads around it, and it also helps us turn complex things into stuff we can use in a small business and specially in home based business.

Frameworks like COBIT provide us with a way of distilling out the unnecessary.  It is so easy with an IT area to have it seem so complex that you don’t know where to start.  COBIT lets us see what matters, and it provides a strong link between the strategic direction and management of the business, and allows us to identify from those business goals the things that the IT area needs to be doing  That is the fundamental basis of the Getting IT Right service line that I provide through my company, Applied Insight Pty Ltd. It isn’t just something I made up, it has a real basis in research into the practice of IT management.

So for the effective business reporting presentation, I have taken the people-process-technology relationship, added environmental factors in the context of the financial reporting system (so, financial capacity, regulatory compliance, and business strategy), and then linked this to the COBIT process framework (DS11 – Data Management).

This approach can be seen here:

And linking through, I can, using this approach, give you a framework you can use to diagnose and assess the effectiveness of your financial reporting systems:

I have done this simply by identifying the key words in the COBIT control objective identified – it talks about words like ‘complete’, ‘accurate’, valid’ etc (as referred to in blue), and then you have a coherent, flexible, approach to the delivery of effectiveness business reporting without the need to make it up (so we know it’s complete) but not so complex and rich that it can’t be understood.

If I as a business can take these factors and score them

in some way, I have a good approach for assessing the health of my business reporting systems.  And that is half of the purpose of the presentation coming up is anyway.

Best practices in information technology

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Today I presented to CPA Country Congress on Best Practices in Business Information Technology in Townsville.

Objectives

  • To provide an overview of what’s on the horizon in the next generation of IT for business, and how to prepare your business to take advantage of these future IT advances.

Agenda

  • Next generation IT – what’s on the horizon in the next 2 – 5 years
  • Managing risk and protecting your systems in a wireless and mobile environment
  • System selection for your business
  • Getting your systems right
  • Creating opportunities to develop your business
  • Maximising your return from your technology investment
  • Conclusion – meeting the challenges of IT

As always, maybe I’m delusional but I think the presentation went well.  If you were in the audience, please feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.

You can download the slides for this presentation from the link below:

 

Thanks for stopping by…

Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks

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As promised in my last post, I attach to this blog post my speaker’s notes for today’s session ‘Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks’.  This presentation was given at Ark Group Australasia’s Data Quality Conference, held on 30th April 2008 at Crystal Palaces, Luna Park in Sydney.  I undertook the presentation as a Director of Applied Insight Pty Ltd, my business systems consulting company. 

The brochure for this conference can be found here.

My speaker’s notes are available below:

For completeness, here are my slides as provided to conference participants (in PDF form):

As always, feedback from members of the audience, via comments or an email, is very welcome.  I hope it was an interesting approach at some level. 

I did at one stage think of going all Gordon Ramsey (he of ‘Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares’) on the audience – I’m a brand new fan, it’s just like consulting but with more swearing and nan bread! – but decided against it.  Perhaps next time, that’s what I’ll do – I’ll try good-consultant, bad-consultant.  Probably at least as good as my idea of having a 40-minute presentation with a single slide with four circles on it.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to combine the two approaches. 

By the way, I loved the venue – at least it will stand out in my memory, that’s for sure.  Here’s a photo I took outside:

I am fairly certain it is the only data quality conference ever held in a theme park.

Data quality conference: Data governance and data quality

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I seem to have missed blogging about the fact that Ark Group asked me to present a session at their conference in Sydney today (30th April 2008).  My presentation was entitled ‘Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks’.  I promised people in the audience that I would blog my notes to today’s presentation, which I will do as soon as I am back online (probably tomorrow around midday I’d say). 

Anyway – the taxi driver couldn’t find the address for the conference – the address is 1 Olympic Drive, Milson’s Point in Sydney.  The fun part?  This must be the first data quality conference in the entire world held in a theme park – 1 Olympic Drive is the Crystal Palaces in Luna Park.  I have to say – what an impressive venue!  A shame that the hot dog stands, the cartoonist, and the laughing clowns weren’t operating!

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I feel I got good feedback from various people after the conference in the audience.  I spoke at 4.10pm on the second day of a 2-day conference.  That’s always a tough call but hopefully I was energetic enough – it’s kind of hard when you had to wake up at 4.10am to give a presentation at 4.10pm (rather crazily, I asked Aimee Rootes of Ark Group to get me ‘the first flight down’ and ‘the last flight back’.  Which is why I have now been waiting for the flight for three hours at Sydney Airport now.

Talk about your lessons learned.  Anyway, I was glad to share a taxi with Suzette Bailey of Sensory7 and we got to speak the same language in the back of the taxi – there aren’t all that many people in the western world who actually understand the language I speak, so it was refreshing to do so.

Next post:  advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks. 

But this is a nice post on IT alignment…

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And of course what operating system one uses doesn’t really matter – it’s a matter of thinking about how business value can be delivered (still, hate that ribbon):

5 Tips on IT Alignment That Can Generate Profit

Matches nicely with the IT Strategy and methodology I’m developing in my ‘spare’ time…

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