New mobile, cloud-based technologies that connect wide-ranging business signals and voluminous data seek to alter the paradigm. While organizations are awash in data, finance chiefs by and large cannot capture it, make sense of it and base timely decisions on it. Through the cloud, however, data from across the enterprise can pulse toward finance, where it can be turned into information for decision-making purposes.
"If prosperity is saved time, then this is the pot of gold," declares Steve Player, North American program director at the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a learning network with more than 50 corporate members. Player is referring to the ability to marry Big Data, mobility and the cloud to provide nimbler assessments of performance versus the forecast. This, in turn, permits faster adjustments in resource allocation, project priorities and other budgeted initiatives.
