There are plenty of exciting challenges ahead for finance departments, such as the opportunity to develop new business models, the rethinking of existing value chains, and the rise of the chief value officer... Corporate reporting and business communication, within and outside the organization, all need to accompany and drive those transformations. Company culture transformation may be the last sustainable competitive advantage.

After quite some time of intense customer-facing activities, I'm delighted to manage again an internal program, as Product Manager in charge of the Corporate Performance Management solution. I'm deeply curious and highly committed to join a seasoned management team to transition our R&D department from cascade to agile in order to build an efficient software factory. To serve an ambitious business plan, it is necessary to be able to rely on an agile and efficient delivery model.

In order to better understand, manage and at the end achieve our goals, we are often expected to take decisions, literally selecting between options. The more important the objectives, the more precise and flexible the underlying model should be. Planning analytics is about complementing traditional planning with real-time operational signals; adding new perspectives so as to get a systemic understanding of what's going on. As it can become quite sophisticated, only the strategic indicators deserve the investment. And obviously what was strategic a few years ago may be slightly different today! « Plans are nothing. Planning is everything»

While eighteen months ago, to implement a digital strategy was one of the initiatives to start, today it is about changing the culture and integrating digital into all aspects of the business.The idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution recently described amongst others by Klaus Schwab from the WEF is particularly interesting.A phrase perfectly describes this theory: « The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. »

A new approach with a stronger focus on outcomes rather than on processes and that is seeking proactivity and participation... This is at least one of the lessons learned from the recent failure of some risk governance methodologies.The path to move from the existing documentation-centric approach to something really efficient would be to merge the business perfomance process with the governance of risks.Several companies acquired by IBM in the last years have been selected to ultimately build solutions to fulfill that objective.

IBM acquired a few years ago two companies ; the first one was providing a GRC solution ( Governance, Risk and Compliance) and the other one Market-, Credit- and Liquidity risk calculation engines. A common negative pattern of any acquisition is employee turnover. The positive side of it ; it gave me the opportunity to rebuild the European GRC center of competence. We identified people with some risk background but also with a broader analytics experience in order to promote the vision of merging risk management and business performance processes.The market adoption is really positive but the cultural shift may take years in some organisations.

Managing by objectives and especially deriving compensation from numbers requires data quality and agile accounting processes.We started the re-engineering of the management accounting process after the change has been announced as a New Year's resolution. We were ready and almost accurate for the mid-year compensation reporting. Have you already heard that a strong executive sponsorship can speed up a project delivery? I firmly believe so and experienced it as a key success factor. Thank you Mr. CFO.

For medium to large sophisticated data warehouses, in order to be successful, it may need to start 3 times from scratch. This is what we did it and at the end it became a very cost efficient architecture. Our end to end mission critical enterprise data warehouse is delivering harmonized access to information to all internal and external stakeholders and is one of the key building blocks of the company's successful BPO offer (Business Process Outsourcing).

As Ginni Rometty has been stating since she became IBM’s CEO : "Data is becoming the world’s new natural resource."Unifying reporting initiatives throughout the organization and aligning user experience and methodologies was the starting point.We facilitated the shift for numerous mid-sized and large organisations in Switzerland which wanted to go that path. They could enforce a business intelligence culture thanks to reliable outcomes with a much better return on investments and lower operational costs.

It was an amazing period with great innovations. I’m glad I could participate to the emergence of the first e-commerce and e-banking sites in Switzerland.Beside providing solutions to manage the classical transactional streams, we also could advise early adopters in setting up the rules driven personalized portals in order to provide an augmented customer experience.