Five years ago, I wrote a 30-page Management Accounting Guideline on business continuity management (BCM) best practices for CMA (this article is pulled from the longer report).

Since then, I’ve always remained alert to BCM news, trends, and developments, such as pandemic planning.

Since I hadn’t seen any major BCM news or breakthroughs in several weeks, I checked in with Brian Kinman, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who leads his firm’s enterprise risk management (ERM) practice. more

How many data warehouses and data marts does your organization have? Finance probably has at least one data warehouse and possibly several data marts. And that’s just your department.

Enterprise data warehousing (EDW) has been around for well over a decade. IBM has been long promoting it. So have Oracle and HP and many others. The traditional EDW, however, has been sidelined even now, a time when data is exploding at a tremendous rate and new data types, from sensor data to smartphone and social media data to video data are becoming pervasive. IBM recently projected a 44-fold increase in data and content, reaching 35 zettabytes by 2020 (a zettabyte equals 1000 bytes raised to the seventh power).

In short, the world of data has changed dramatically since organizations began building the conventional EDW. Now the EDW needs to accommodate these new types of data and be flexible enough to handle rapidly changing forms of data and analytics. more

Judging by the initial public offerings (IPO) that already have come to the market this year, along with investment bankers’ predictions for the remainder of the year, the economy is indeed looking up. “If the investment bankers’ predictions play out, it will be a good year,” says Wendy Hambleton, partner in the capital markets area with accounting firm BDO. BDO recently surveyed 100 capital markets executives to get their thoughts on the market for IPOs during the second half of 2011.

More than half of the investment bankers surveyed predicted continued growth in the number and size of IPOs during the second half of 2011. Nearly 60 percent of respondents forecast an increase in the number of IPOs with 18 percent predicting a substantial jump. Only 13 percent anticipate a drop, and 28 percent said the market would remain unchanged.

If history is any guide, the number of IPOs indeed will jump. In seven of the last eight years, the number of IPOs increased in the last six months of the year, BDO reports. more

Two software applications I follow, price and revenue optimization (PRO) and sales compensation and incentives, can be highly complementary when used together. Unfortunately, since they typically are developed and sold by different kinds of software vendors, scant attention has been paid to the value of using them in tandem. I advise companies that have adopted a PRO strategy to use an incentive management application also to support and reinforce their optimization efforts.

Price and revenue optimization is an analytics-driven business discipline that uses market segmentation techniques and historical data to set a price that represents the most an individual buyer is willing to pay. It is one example of how businesses have successfully applied predictive analytics to achieve both strategic and tactical objectives. Companies use PRO to achieve strategic objectives such as increased profitability or higher market share and tactically to adapt quickly to competitors’ moves. more

Do you ever have difficulty getting rid of a business book?

I need to “spring-clean” my shelves every few months or I risk drowning in print thanks to the generous publicists at Harvard Business School Press, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Penguin and other fine publishing houses. These folks still help expand my business intelligence by sending me review copies (despite my pleas for them to cut their clients’ marketing costs by instead zipping “e-review” copies via Kindle ).

For some reason, a book I only periodically scan for ideas, David Apgar’s “Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What We Don’t Know” (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), has eluded my book-donation trips to the awesome Yarborough Public Library for five-plus years. more