What is your organisation missing? Let’s see:
- Have a hot IT team, capable of establishing reliable, secure, performing systems within budget? Check.
- Have a keen finance team, dedicated, involved, trusted? Check.
So where’s the gap?
It’s certainly there. I know it is because I often can’t deliver the information that managers want; I can’t answer the root cause questions to the numbers that I present. This gap is a cause of systems falling short of expectation, of organisations not being able to get out of their systems what they are looking for.
The bases are not covered
I believe the gap arises where
- accountants take responsibility for the content and meaning of data but not how to store and retrieve it, and
- IT people take responsibility for storage and retrieval of data but no accountability for what the numbers mean or how they are presented*, but
- nobody understands both.
* - I’m grateful to Stephan-Robert Langer for giving me this characterisation of how accountants and IT people relate to data.
The same gap is identified by David Carter in his call to accountants to break up the BI party.
Filling the Gap
I think I’ve long recognised this gap, because I invariably took on the role of filling it in all of the companies I worked for. So who is in the best place to fill it, an IT person willing to learn financial concepts and take on responsibility for the meaning of data, or an accountant not afraid to grapple with SQL, data normalisation and storage technologies?
It sounds a tough call on both counts, doesn’t it? However, the pragmatic answer is clear. At the end of the day, the accountant is accountable for the numbers, and if that means straddling the gap into IT skills to ensure they can be delivered and explained then that needs to be done. No one else is going to do it.
Published May 8th, 2007
in Excel, Reconciliation and Isolist.
Phew! There’s a surprising amount of work involved in taking a product from my development PC and making it ready for general use. But finally, today, I’ve published the Beta version of Moverve’s first product, Isolist.
As explained in an earlier post, Isolist is an AddIn for Excel, providing a dedicated reconciliation function that matches the records from two data lists and identifies any mismatches. The requirement to perform such list-matching tasks is wide-spread:- certainly for management accountants but also, I believe, more generally too.
To get the ball rolling, I’m giving a special offer to users of the Beta version who can find and let me know of any bugs or other problems with the product. If you find a genuine software problem, I’ll send you a free license for version 1.
Published April 19th, 2007
in Excel.
Shortly after first learning how to use spreadsheets ( only 17 years ago ) I had a conversation with a friend along these lines:
Me - Creating spreadsheets is a little bit like programming. In fact, you could say that it is a sort of programming.
Friend - Programming? Spreadsheets? They don’t look like programming to me.
Me - I admit the ‘programming language’ is unusual and very high level, maybe like a 4GL, but look at what’s happening: You start with a blank sheet, you give the computer a set of rules and some input data and it generates outputs. Conceptually that’s a program, isn’t it?
Friend - [with a sceptical look] Hmmm.
I’d forgotten that converstion until today when I read Writing formulas is computer programming.
Of course it makes no difference whether or not you call using a spreadsheet programming. The fact that you could call it programming, though, is interesting because it indicates that programming needn’t be scary or nerdy. If you can accept that then you’re more likely to make more effective use of your PC.
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