Deloitte, too, picked up on the idea noting that companies face many challenges with the financial close and reporting process. For Deloitte the last mile covers the processes and activities in between the trial balance and a company’s 10K. In this last mile organizations can experience management reporting and governance issues—including financial and internal control failures—resulting not only in significant inefficiencies but also financial errors and internal control failures.

The solution, according to Deloitte, calls for a holistic approach, which entails developing a road map for improvement to address the process, the policy, the people, and the technology issues, and how they successfully work together to improve the efficiency, governance, and quality of your financial reporting and close. Technology plays a key role. (more…)

What distinguishes strong from weak leaders?

Having all the knowledge means nothing without the right types of people. One person can make a big difference. They can be someone who somehow gets it altogether and changes the fabric of an organization’s culture not through mandating change but by engaging and motivating others.

For some leaders irritating people is not only a sport but it is their personal entertainment. They are rarely successful. Dunn referenced studies that conclude that the three primary success factor for effective leaders is technical competence, critical thinking skills, and communication skills. (more…)

The benefit of desktop virtualization is the ability to more efficiently deliver desktop computing to individual workers faster and with many fewer people involved. In effect, it eliminates the overhead of delivering desktop computing desktop by desktop.

IDC has become bullish on VDI in the last year. You can see what it says here. A new approach to VDI, however, can do even better. (more…)

Not so fast. “Once an organization adopts cloud computing it quickly becomes apparent that the traditional approach to ITSM needs to be reviewed,” writes Malcolm Fry, in a white paper titled 5 Questions About ITSM and Cloud Computing, published by CA Technologies. Furthermore, “failure to change traditional IT approaches when adopting a cloud service will greatly increase the chances of failure,” he warns.

A recent ITP Report, reinforced that point: organizations will require continual monitoring of cloud computing. This will be essential to avoid costly mistakes, according to Gartner. Here are five tools Logicalis, an international IT managed services provider suggests can help management. (more…)

Even when the government does publish such data, it often lacks consistency and can’t be electronically read, says Hudson Hollister, the Coalition’s founder and executive director. As a result, efforts to search the data to identify spending patterns or instances of waste, fraud or abuse are more difficult than they need to be — if not pointless. (more…)

The Hanlon lab sits at the heart of Stevens’s Financial Systems Center (FSC). Noted as the first of its kind in the United States, the FSC will serve as a platform for financial systems research, and the development, testing and evaluation of software for financial networks and the investigation of cyber-security challenges in the financial domain. The Center was formed to apply systems thinking and related methods to analyze, understand, and characterize the behavior of the complex global financial system.

For CFOs, the FSC may provide prime recruitment ground for talent trained in leading edge financial approaches. Overall, 28% of Stevens grads last year went in Finance. (more…)

To flip the situation around, IBM this week unveiled a family of what it describes as expert integrated systems called PureSystems. The first two are PureFlex and PureApplication. IBM calls these expert systems because it has baked into the system large amounts of automated best practices around the majority of the processes for which most organizations need systems, whether web applications, database applications, or almost anything else a company might do.

These are, according to Rod Adkins, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, “a new category of business computing that combines server, storage and networking resources along with an array of built-in software patterns and business processes into one highly automated and easily managed machine.” Here’s how this can change the IT cost-value equation. (more…)

Increasing numbers of baby boomers will be looking to retire in the near future. This includes entrepreneurs who have developed successful businesses or professional practices. Many of them will pass their businesses on to their children or other relatives. But for others, retirement means selling the business whose success was due to their hard work and reputation.

If the business was operated as a C corporation, an asset sale will result in the seller paying two levels of tax. Moreover, current tax law provides significant tax benefits to sellers if the sale of business assets can be structured to produce capital gains rather than ordinary income. One way to eliminate the second layer of tax and produce capital gains to the seller is to allocate a portion of the purchase price to the seller’s “personal goodwill.” Purchasers will also benefit because the amount paid for the personal goodwill can be recovered over 15 years. (more…)

The gains come not as the result of some magical technology that suddenly renders threats benign but mainly as the result of diligent pursuit of basic security blocking and tackling. Companies are being more alert to patching vulnerabilities faster and developing and deploying more security-aware software code. The attackers are still there, ready to exploit any weakness they find. Only now the software is not as vulnerable as before.

The latest X-Force report should not be construed to mean that companies can drop their guard or reduce their IT security spending. Deprived of their easy targets the bad guys, the report suggests, are pursuing different avenues of attack. (more…)

How big is Big Data? By 2015 the digital universe, as forecast by IDC, will hit 8 zettabytes (ZB). (1ZB = 1021 bytes, one sextillion bytes). Adding to the sheer volume is the remarkable velocity at which data is created. Every minute 600 new blog posts are published and 34,000 Twitter tweets are sent. If some of that data is about your organization, brand, products, customers, competitors, or employees would you want to know?

This isn’t just for large organizations. Midsize and small businesses can benefit from Big Data too. A small pizza shop chain needs to know the consumer buzz about its pizza as much as Domino’s. Vendors are rushing out products to make Big Data analytics even easier. (more…)