CPA Australia – going places

Anyone who has half-glanced at my CV or some of my blog posts will note that although I provide information systems consulting services to my clients, I am actually a lapsed accountant.  The reason I remain so passionate about CPA Australia is that I think a Commerce or Business degree from a university is the best entry point into the world of business, bar none.  This is even more true if, as a student, you are not certain of your future direction.  Commerce generally, and accounting particularly, lets you direct your career to meet your changing circumstances and professional preferences.  And of course I think CPA Australia is the best accounting professional body for allowing you this flexibility.  Naturally.

By way of example, I quote the members of the CPA Australia Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence (which I chair) – all qualified accountants (with one exception), all working in very different fields.  This wasn’t necessarily because they felt that accounting was their best entree into the world of IT, but rather because it allowed their career to be flexible and follow their interest whilst maintaining a leading business professional qualification. 

All of which is leading up to the fact that I note that CPA Australia’s new advertising campaign was launched this week.  I had a sneak preview at the new Queensland President’s networking drinks last week (Lyndal Drennan is the new Queensland CPA President) but the ads are, I think, their best yet.  You can see them here:  CPA Australia Advertising Campaign 2006. 

Nicolette Sharp - the only time she goes backwards...

Professional Services Firms and Technology

I have been working for professional service firms since 1997 (nearly 9 years!), and I recall sitting in a meeting with the national board of a former employer – a national accounting firm – in 1997 when the topic of email came up.  Most didn’t understand it, most thought it could be an expensive exercise and ‘anyway, clients pick up the phones to talk to me, they don’t email me’.  A reasonably rational response in 1997, but in 2006, particularly as Generation X and Y take over from the baby boomers, email is becoming a preferred medium of communication.

Email is still a particularly dangerous form of communication when communicating with clients – confusion can reign supreme and ambiguity can become the order of the day if you are not careful, and I now have a policy of making a phone call before sending an email for that reason (however, policies were made to be broken, I have found!).  However, clients do expect email communications fairly instantaneously, which is why I found Ross Dawson’s Blog‘s entry on ‘The Seven Mega-Trends of Professional Services‘ particularly interesting.  I can only concur with most of the comments made regarding professional services firms in terms of client sophistication, transparency, governance, commoditisation, and so on.

What is also interesting to me is that this is a white paper that Ross Dawson wrote for Epicor, which is business software we recently recommended to a client as a management system for a professional services firm.  Much to my surprise, in many respects, given that it wasn’t a dedicated practice management system (like, say, Solution6/MYOB, APS, CMS Open, or Keystone), it met all our criteria (proven capability, functionality, low-risk) for the client in that circumstance.

Serendipity drives the world.

Corporate Governance, Boards, and ICT

As you may have noticed by now, IT Governance is something of a professional passion for me (I also have two dogs but that’s not a professional passion!). 

ZDNet, who feature regularly in these pages, ran an article recently on ‘Do Boards get ICT?‘. 

I left a comment on the board about this topic, which I reproduce here:

“In looking at the issues raised in your commentary, ‘Do boards get ICT?’ I note that you are saying that boards often remain focussed on ‘cutting the costs of IT’ rather than ‘what can IT do to achieve efficiency’.

An interesting effect of ‘cutting the costs of IT’ is often an increase in overall costs to the business – IT can’t undertake Department X’s project (because it cut costs) and Department X does without or finds a hollow log to cobble together an external solution.

The topic really is one of IT governance – corporate governance of the IT business function. You should note that a Director of a listed company has to comply with the corporate governance requirements of the ASE, and although these aren’t specifically IT they do discuss the need to recognise opportunity to create value and riskiness of the situation. There is also AS8015-2005 from Standards Australia which outlines a best practice model here.

Australia’s leading accounting body, CPA Australia (I chair the IT Centre of Excellence), released a very good and practical guide for Company Directors and Business Executives in October 2005 – see http://michealaxelsen.com/blog/?p=46 and https://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/SID-3F57FEDF-79F61B28/cpa/hs.xsl/1017_16305_ENA_HTML.htm.

The point is, a board does in fact need to understand its business approach to ICT, and put in specific governance mechanisms particularly where the business is very reliant upon ICT. The CPA Australia publication gives a practical approach for any board that wants to fulfill its duties and legal requirements.

I am happy to discuss with anyone on the topic.

Thanks:  Micheal Axelsen”

Just to maintain it for posterity, really…

The View: It’s time to go home

The following article is reproduced from an article written by Micheal Axelsen and published in CPA Australia’s “InTheBlack” journal, December 2005.  The article is also published under my publications section (it’s an opinion piece, in case you can’t tell).

The View:  It’s time to go home

Home is where the blackberry is?I’m in a coffee shop in Melbourne the morning after Hurricane Katrina hits. In a rather surreal twist I can connect to the internet to chat in online forums with people that had just left the devastated areas, or were in the process of being devastated. Such events lead to cheerful considerations of whether information technology is a universally positive thing, like, say, the invention of low-fat chocolate, or something slightly more sinister. If you had found yourself in such a horrific situation, ask yourself this: “What is the one thing I need when my house is about to be blown away by a hurricane?”. For one person at least, it was to make a post to an online forum and then take his hard drive – with him to the storm shelter.

In walking to this coffee shop from the hotel, I saw three people cross the road while staring fixedly at their mobile phone and texting someone or browsing the internet. One woman was nearly run over and seemed to consider the situation to be a somewhat annoying break in the middle of her conversation.

As further evidence of technology’s strident dictatorship of our lives, I continue to receive emails on that most addictive of devices, the insidious Blackberry even though the office is 2000 km away.

I increasingly find that clients are rushing towards the sweetly seductive promises of technology: that a particular gadget will “make your business more competitive”, that it will “decrease your turnaround time”, and it will “make you productive on the road”.

The salesmen for these mobile torture instruments rarely discuss the side-effects: that you will acquire a nervous tic in your eye every time you hear a high-pitched beep, never be able to completely relax anywhere, or develop a low opinion of those who do not answer their emails within 12.5 seconds.

All that time we spend in the back of taxis, apparently, is what we need to use more productively to keep ourselves effective and on track as the successful advisers to business we CPAs are.

I happen to think that I was already using that downtime effectively, thanks very much. I need it to recharge my batteries to keep interested in the job at hand. As far as my clients are concerned, they deserve to know that I am on top of my game and worth what I am charging them. If I haven’t had time to properly look over their work, or have been constantly distracted by office disasters that someone else should be looking after, I haven’t met their expectations of me as a professional.

We are all human and if you want to achieve the best business results, you need to down tools and go home. Forty or fifty productive hours a week is much better than eighty hours wondering whether your “significant other” would understand if you were to stand them up tonight.

This Christmas, think about the technological tools used in your business. There are definite business benefits to these gadgets and mobile devices – but you need to be careful. If you’re thinking about that gadget in the shiny plastic wrapper, and how desperately you need it, ask yourself how you survived to your current age without it, and then ask how you will really use it. If the answer is “poorly” – then don’t buy it.

Your first rule this summer should be “No Christmas presents that need electricity!”. Buy yourself an abacus if you feel you need to keep in touch with numbers, or do a jigsaw puzzle with your family.

Australian Accounting Review Supplement

The Australian Accounting Review (Supplement #37, November 2005) issue devoted to information technology/systems issues was released in November. I reproduce a small portion of the supplementary edition editorial (which was co-written by John Campbell, Shauna Kelly, and myself – but mostly John) below:

The traditional objective of accounting is to provide information about the pecuniary affairs of an organisation. While this is largely a historical activity that focuses on past performance, the information that accounting provides also forms a useful basis for future action. In this historical context, information technology is commonly viewed as providing a productivity-enhancing and cost-effective means of storing and monitoring transactions, standardising fundamental accounting operations and facilitating compliance and financial reporting obligations. Information technology has reduced the cost of these traditional accounting functions by facilitating the processing and monitoring of large amounts of information about organisational performance. Despite the accretion of these and other benefits to the profession in general, there still exists a degree of uncertainty about the role of accounting professionals in the selection, use and management of information technology in organisations.

The papers in this special Australian Accounting Review supplement address important aspects of information technology that are of relevance to accounting practitioners and researchers. The supplement has been commissioned by CPA Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Information Technology and Management.*

The call for papers for this special edition attracted a large number of high-quality submissions, making the final selection process difficult. All research papers were peer-reviewed and carefully scrutinised by the Centre of Excellence to ensure that those selected for publication reflect the diversity of information technology issues relevant to the profession. The papers that follow deal with a broad range of topics, from discussion and research on IT governance, the impact of IT on business models, electronic business evaluation and adoption, information systems audit and control, IT investment decision-making and strategic planning in government agencies.

You can access this online through CPA Australia, or sometimes authors will provide copies upon request.

Feature articles from the November 2005 edition of Australian Accounting Review (Supplement #37 only) include:

Editorial: information technology – impacts and implications for accounting
Editorial for edition 37 of the Australian Accounting Review information technology supplement.

IT governance – are boards and business executives interested onlookers or committed participants?
This paper looks at what has to be governed and what IT governance needs to encompass to be effective, examines some of the issues of current IT governance practices from boardroom and business perspectives.

IT investment practices in large Australian firms
This review explores the procedures used by large Australian firms during the four major decisionmaking stages of the IT investment cycle: planning, evaluation, implementation and postimplementation review.

The social dimension of business and IS/IT alignment: case studies of six public-sector organisations
This paper presents the results of a study of the social dimension of the alignment of business strategy with information systems and information technology.

The pervasiveness of information and communication technology: its effects on business models and implications for the accounting profession
This paper discusses the main challenge that confronts firms because of the continued development in information and communication technologies (ICT) is the reduction in information asymmetry as product markets become increasingly information driven.

Consideration of options from an entrepreneuria, technical and operational perspective – an e-business design framework approach
This paper draws upon the emergent knowledge of e-business, together with traditional strategy theory, and provide a simple framework for the evaluation of business models for e-business.

The effect of e-commerce adoption on small/medium enterprise industry structure, competitive advantage and long-term profitability
This paper seeks to evaluate the relationship between e-commerce adoption and long-term profitability in small/medium enterprises (SMEs).

Information systems audit and control issues for enterprise management systems: qualitative evidence
This paper presents the results of a study on how the introduction of such software creates a new set of information systems audit and control problems.

Supplement on information technology
This issue of Australian Accounting Review is accompanied by a special supplement dedicated to new research work on Information Technology and Management.

Enterprise resource planning systems – implications for managers and management
This paper analyses the implications of enterprise resource planning systems for organisations in general and for managers and professionals in particular.

Feel free to email me if you you need details – these articles can usually be purchased through CPA Australia if you are not a subscriber.