You have developed the strategic plan; you’ve identified the short- and long-term strategies and goals. But how well have you advised your organization on developing leading indicators to provide an early warning system for your board and executive and management teams? Are you still managing off the financials or lagging indicators? By the time the books close 10,15, 20, 25 days after month’s end, the impacts of yesterday’s decisions are already being felt. Wouldn’t you want to get ahead of the curve to know with some degree of certainty what is coming? Of course, we all do. more

What function or team within your organization is ideally positioned to take a lead oversight role in your company’s transition to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)?

How about internal audit?

Now that internal auditors have (hopefully) handed off ongoing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to business process owners and made some headway on enterprise risk management (ERM) programs, could they be assigned to be the “eyes and ears of the audit committee” and a “business advisor” on IFRS implementation?

Ernst & Young thinks so. In a new paper, “Inside IFRS: The Opportunity for Internal Audit,” the firm argues that IA’s enterprise-wide purview of the organization and its business processes make it “uniquely qualified to assist business units with their assessment of [IFRS] conversion’s likely impact and to help develop plans for implementing the necessary changes.”

That sounds about right, but how many internal audit functions are sufficiently staffed, and have enough time, to add IFRS to their list? more

In an earlier entry, I mentioned Chet Richards’s book Certain to Win, which is about Colonel John Boyd’s OODA Loop. In this posting, I want to share how we came up with the name for the next book I am co-authoring.

It wasn’t easy.

The book is about forecasting. It will be published by Wiley & Sons early next year. The publishing team, co-author Steve Morlidge and I, brainstormed several titles, none of which quite resonated. more

Did it ever occur to you that you, Mr. or Ms. CFO, your executive team, and your employees are the biggest security threat to your organization’s data? The latest study from Ponemon Institute, Traverse City, MI, the parent institution of the Responsible Information Management (RIM) Council, identifies a number of common behaviors that jeopardize the organization’s data, confirming previous studies by others.

And the primary culprits are the organization’s own employees. The study, sponsored by IronKey, a secure USB flash drive vendor, suggests that it is mainly insiders, typically employees, who are putting corporate data at risk by routinely and knowingly violating a variety of policies. They aren’t being malicious or malevolent; usually they are simply trying to do their work in the easiest and fastest way. more