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It is said figures can lie, but lies cannot figure. Reading the NYC city accounts to the truth on how that business is being managed is the key to unravel their financial fiasco. If you want to know how not to do a set of accounts take a look art theirs.




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Doing a business intelligence project is an enterpise job, no less. But often that is the real value is the hard work of sorting out all the data. The Pareto theory to focuses on 20% of effort to get 80% of the value does not work in business intelligence projects. You need to get 100% of the data right and cleaned up before it can be mapped and reported consistently.


Cutting corners doing a departmental projects may work for a while but in the end if it is not linked to the core published finance results it will be soon be undermined and will eventually end in the scrap bin of good ideas that did not fly along with those who attempted to fly them.
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As a consultant most of us know that much of our work is detailed and exploratory. Making change means we need to study and discuss the gaps in the “what is” position so you can have a discussion about changing that state. This takes planning thought and collaborative skill to get people to dig into the detail and then go a new way to fix the problems. That process can be both continuous and radical.

Either way it happens best if the process is fun so people enjoy engaging to get detail information and explore looking for solutions and best practices. Teaching which has a very different objective parallels with consulting well. It also provides great insights in the way learning as with change can be made to be fun Read More

I want to share with you a an experience I had negotiating a contract. During this process it struck me that even though we know there are no fairy godmothers, we still believe they will take care of us.

My boss had once warned me about taking that approach adding,

"You can lose your shirt if you don’t get your pricing right. But you will lose your business if you compromise on your terms and conditions.

Don’t take shortcuts on conditional as there are no such things as fairy godmothers to bail you out."
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Few things are as critical to CFO's as systems. And core accounting budgeting and back office infrastructure are all moving on-line into an entirely new business model called “Software as a Service”. This is the largest change in technology for the Finance profession since the Internet began.


The controlling dynamics of this massive change make this subject even more compelling when we consider who will be controlling our daily lives in the future. Read More

The changes going on in Information Technology (IT) servicing are gargantuan and moving quickly to be service based.

IT delivery as a corporate function is undergoing fundamental change with computing service now often being delivered directly by providers as commodity service to end users.

What does this mean for business and the consumer markets in general and what are the benefits? And what is the outlook for people working in this industry now being displaced?
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Here is some advice I got as a student. To make ends meet, I took a job selling wedding chest products.

My sales coach at the time told me. “Don’t try to sell products, show solutions to real problems And something practical that goes with that is a mattress test”

"What is a mattress test?" I quizzed and I got a lesson for life. Read More

I got to thinking about how we pay our providers. So I took a look and found we waste a lot of time in process and have poor practices with potential to demotivate, or even lose our service providers, who we rely on for our delivery capability.

Take a look at how others see this issue too. Read More