Published on the 15/07/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
‘It’s never been a more exciting time for the technology industry’ – Oracle GM…
As annoying and perplexing as it undoubtedly is for older generations, Pokémon Go is doing at least two things astoundingly well. One, it is making a ton of money for Nintendo and other shareholders. Two, it is a fine demonstration of what the industry is today capable of. And that buzz in the consumer space is matched by excitement in the C-suite, as the possibilities of ‘consumer-style’ (read ‘fun to use’) enterprise software is driving fundamental change in how things get done today.
That’s the thrust of a discussion with Asbjorn Aakjaer, GM Applications at Oracle NZ. As an industry, he said, “We’re back to where we were maybe 15 years ago and it is hard to keep up.”
The drive down memory lane doesn’t mean we’ve regressed. Instead, Aakjaer is talking about the pervasive optimism that the industry is capable of anything (even putting holo-Pokeys in the way of citizens going about their daily business). “Seeing a 24 percent increase in the value of a company in a day as a result of a single product going live, that’s unheard of. I’d say there’s less than maybe 10 examples in the history of stock markets, where we’ve seen such a massive increase.”
In a strange segue from a computer game into the CFO’s office, continued Aakjaer, he said the basic finance operating model has shifted. “We’ve had a premise of how to run a business and its financials which has been in place for maybe a thousand years. It hasn’t really changed; we’ve taken decisions on historical data to correct the course of business and introduce improvements. It’s purely a backward view.”
Analytics and BI started the change, but until recently, that sort of power was the preserve of the top end of town. “That’s changed with cloud. Almost anyone can how compare, for example, this week’s performance to the same day last year. You can produce real predictive models by ‘pulling a few levers’. In the same way that Pokémon Go is changing the world of gaming, this model will change how businesses will operate.”
Perhaps one of the best examples of how a financial process can change thanks to ‘at the minute’ analysis is Oracle’s concept of the continuous audit. All too often, headlines chart how fraudsters in senior financial management positions cheat the companies they are supposed to serve. “The thing is, these deceptions are usually detected at end of year audit, only long after the money is gone. With enterprise performance management and with it, continuous auditing, it becomes possible to identify anomalies and potential issues as they happen, rather than in the rear-view mirror.”
Aakjaer said CFOs are, broadly, enthusiastic about the possibilities presented by more powerful, affordable analytics combined with cloud applications. “Those I meet with are more able to talk about the future of their company and they are more integrated with other disciplines, such as IT, sales, customer experience, manufacturing. [Enterprise] software is now working the way that we have been using it at home for 10 years, where we have mobile devices, personal KPIs with, for example, steps walked, and have become familiar with managing constant streams of information.”
Access to business technology that powerful is today within the reach of the average Kiwi company, Aakjaer said.
