With all the March Madness going on right now, a basketball analogy seems in order (or at least some pics from my local court).  Like hockey, basketball is a great example of a team sport that benefits from the guys on the bench as well as the guys on the court.  Even though it’s usually not given a real solid acknowledgment in the sports media, all the bench guys are still an integral part of the team and all contribute to the team’s success (when they do succeed).

It’s about the program.  It’s about scrimmage.  It’s about strategy.  It’s about training.  It’s a team.

That said, do you think there’s even one bench warrior who wouldn’t rather be in the game?

To a man, I think the answer is no.

Business isn’t much different, is it?  There are the star players and then there are the guys who “ride the pine”.  You may know them by another name, “Cost Center”.  In Accounting and Finance, we hear that term a lot.  Usually it comes up around budget time.  It comes up around bonus time.  You want headcount?  But, you’re a Cost Center!

So, how does one go from being viewed as a Cost Center to being viewed as a Revenue Center?  From being a Beancounter to being a Strategic CFO?

The distance between the two can seem broad:

Finding actionable business intelligence that will enhance sales and cash flow while hammering down inefficiency and expenses is the mark of The Strategic CFO and it’s the key for getting in the game.

To go from being an observer:

To driving the hoop:

Here’s some resources to get you going:

A High Value CFO is… (CFO Coach)

Strategy on the Morph (Harvard Business Review)

Midsized Companies Need Strategic CFOs, Not Beancounters (Ventana Research)

Can Technology Make CFO’s and Controller’s Jobs More Strategic? (Technology Evaluation Centers Blog)

What does Get in the Game mean to you?

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Understanding Business is a Game of Questions
2. Software Implementation by the Book
3. Business Intelligence Adds a Dimension to Your Strategy

Last week, we were talking with Cheni Yerushalmi, co-counder of Sunshine Suites, about Measuring What Matters.  I think the main takeaway, from an Indicee point of view, is that the company’s Financial Reports were deemed much less important to the running of the business than were Operational Measures.

Today, we’ll move away from some of the broad philosophical implications of the question, “How do you measure success?” that we tackled with Cheni and move into the practical side of what measurement tools are being employed in mid-sized businesses and what measures are considered important in a conversation with MAKE Technologies CFO, Wendy Van Donkelaar.

MAKE Technologies Inc. is a Vancouver based software solution provider that analyzes and modernizes all three aspects of legacy enterprise applications: business processes, source code and data. MAKE’s modernization platform, TLM, helps their global customer base to reduce the cost & risk required to maintain and modernize their mission critical systems.

Wendy Van Donkelaar is a Financial Executive and Chartered Accountant with over 20 years experience in the technology sector.

I was interested in getting her take on the role of I.T. Systems for keeping tabs on the health of the business through the use of reports and KPIs.  What I found was, 1) she is strapped for time just like every other Finance Manager I’ve met over the past 10 years, and 2) she employs a number of tools to get the answers she needs to effectively manage the company’s finances.

So, here’s the Q & A:

1. How do you analyze operational performance? We use SFA [Salesforce Automation], SA [Simply Accounting] and excel spreadsheets to analyze performance.
2. What are the critical operations KPIs? Net new license and services revenues, Sales Funnel growth, Professional services utilization and G/M [Gross Margin], # of partner deals, # of presales presentations per quarter.
3. Do you analyze results on a project-by-project basis? Yes using an excel spreadsheet we are currently evaluating project management systems.
4. How is the Finance function changing/evolving with the onset of new technologies? The function has changed from one of historic information gathering to one of predictive analysis.
5. How do you view the role of spreadsheets in your line of work? Used for summarizing weekly Dashboard metrics and Board reporting.
6. Has your view of spreadsheets changed over time? How so? In my past, spreadsheets where often used for gathering and collating data so that analysis could then be performed.  It now seems like that step has been taken care of by SFA, SA or ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] tools and I focus on smaller sets of data for analysis.

What does it all mean, man?

I’d like to highlight a few things in Wendy’s responses that, in my view, have a profound impact on all of us.  Call them sweeping generalizations if you must, but I see these responses as indicative of the typical situation for those of us working in mid-sized companies doing the accounting.

First, we’re living in a multiple-systems world.  By and large, when we are producing reports we are doing so by gathering data from various systems and collating that data into a cohesive picture of the enterprise.  The systems tend to operate independently of each other.  And inevitably, excel becomes the default aggregator.  Is this your experience? Make a comment!  What systems are you running and how do the systems integrate?

Second, inside the business, operations reports trump financial reporting any day of the week!  Check out the answer to question #2.  Of seven measures given, only one is truly a GAAP number.  Compliance dictates spending a great deal of time on Financial Reports, but these don’t provide actionable data in the same way that things like capacity utilization, or net new business, or sales pipeline does.  Share some of your operational measures in the comments!  What’s the focus in your workplace?

Third, predictive analysis has become mainstream.  There was a time that this topic was reserved for B.I. technicians, I.T. analysts, and academics.  More and more it’s becoming a practical requirement from management.  So, how do you management your predictions?  What oracle are you consulting? How many tea leaves must be read?  How can we know the future?

Let’s get some comments going!

Related posts:

1. Bringing Design Thinking to Accounting and Finance
2. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT Part 2
3. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT

This isn’t a month-end tirade.  Instead, I’m feeling nostalgic so I thought I would share a story from my past.  It’s been some time since I’ve been subjected to the time pressure of month-end & period close activities. For as much accounting has its common elements, every company’s month-end experience is different.  I’ve worked for a number of different companies in a number of different sectors, and no two were the same.

One of the things about Accountancy, and it’s often cited as one of the profession’s advantages, is the ease with which one can move between industries.  The common elements enable it; bank rec’s, financial statements, “the binder”, you know the drill.  I think this is true to a point; however, I have also noticed that we can build up domain expertise as well as anyone in an organization. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this bit.

Today, I’m thinking about some work I did for a mid-sized media company here in Vancouver.  I was brought in as a chair-warmer Analyst while the company restructured and relocated its back office to Toronto.  My predecessor had jumped ship early (before his job was scheduled to disappear), but Toronto wasn’t quite ready to steer the department so the local Controller (who was also on the block) needed someone to wait it out with him.

This was not one of those nightmare month-ends ( I’ll save my nightmare stories for closer to Halloween… and maybe April Fool’s).

I had some pretty standard stuff to do; the bank rec wasn’t pretty, standard payroll auditing for a few hundred employees, a systems conversion meant that we had to chase down some entries that got dropped from one of the back office systems, and then there were the Revenue Reports for the managers.  The Controller did all the financial reports.  He would often describe his month-end consolidations style as the brute force method.  He understood 1) the importance of having a process and 2) the tenacity that is a requirement for the profession.

I’m going to focus on the Revenue Reports for the managers that were part of my month-end process.  I would collect data from the accounting system, from the system that recorded the advertising sales, and the system that generated the physical page layouts (capacity).  This business has a number of publications being produced.  Each publication required a report.  After which, the completed reports were emailed and yes, were printed, for each of the managers.

You’ve probably guessed buy now that I put all of this data into a spreadsheet.  Thinking back, could the company have benefited from Indicee? It probably would have taken a bit of work to set it up and the reports would have looked a bit different, but Indicee probably could have provided the information I was putting into these reports.  But that’s not what I want to tell you about.

I want to tell you about how I learned the process of completing these reports.  The incumbent, clever fellow, had developed his process for these over a number of years and in relative isolation.  He had it down to a science; but, all that knowledge was locked up in his head.  When he walked out that door, the process walked out the door with him. Typical in mid-market companies.  Documentation on complex processes that have evolved over time tends to be weak.  In this case, the damage would be shortlived because these reports were being killed when the head office transition was completed.  In the meantime though, I was left to decipher and de-engineer the reports and get them out to the managers.

To the point:

In the course of my investigation, I found that neither my boss nor some of the other managers actually knew what large parts of the reports meant!  Or why they should care! The process of creating the report, even with practice, was big.  Why was I going through all of this if the end users had no clue what I was giving them? Why had my predecessor done so over the course of a number of years? A pretty big portion of the reports were just wasted effort.

My theory is that reports evolve over time.  This one had evolved, but it hadn’t “lost it’s gills” so to speak.  It was standing upright and talking, but it had a tail.

http://www.cafepress.ca

Tightening up your month-end throughput means recognizing the Darwinian nature of your reports.  Questioning your end users, your internal customers, is key to understanding what parts are no longer relevant.  You’ll need to be persuasive within your organization in order to overcome the natural tendencies toward the status quo.  Be prepared to quiz people.  This part is easier said than done, but with tact and a collaborative attitude gains can be made.  I suggest using the analogy of accounting as a manufacturing process.

Month-end, like any good manufacturing process, needs to be free of waste.

It’s a question of throughput.

That’s my story for today.  For more on stories, I recently produced a guest blog post on the Sage Peachtree Community site called, The Importance of Stories.  Don’t worry, month-end will be there when you get back.

Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Stories
2. The Meaningful Scorecard
3. Sharpen your Business Analysis: Think Like a Reporter

I had a few experiences this past week reminding me that it’s still very much early both in social media adoption and in understanding new technology. Maybe “DOS-based” is a bit of a strong term. Granted, I did help someone set up their 1st email account this week; but, that’s a rare, rare, rare case of a thirtysomething who never went online… until now. Actually, the jury’s still out on that; 3 to 1 the account goes dormant.  That’s not one of the experiences that got me thinking (although it could).

What got me thinking was speaking with another accounting professional about using the Groups in Linkedin for following industry-related discussions and content. I had the chance to provide some insight about twitter; felt good about that. I was informed that it’s still a bit of a big deal to raise a voice online. I guess that should be obvious, but I forget because the conversation IS happening… despite the fact tons of people aren’t here. It’s kind of like turning the much-quoted phrase “Your customers are talking about you whether you participate or not” on its head. When the accounting and finance conversation is isolated, things get considerably quieter.

In a tech-friendly industry like Business Intelligence, it’s similarly insulated but in a different way. There they have been having pretty much the same conversation for the last 50 years. The only difference between then and now is, it’s online now.  Don’t even get me started on Data Quality! ← sorry guys

The other experience that got me thinking was with respect to course content in my professional organization’s (CGA) Information Systems Strategy course. There seems to be a real bias in the material relating to custom-built software over purchased applications. This is surprising to me. What was more surprising is; through discussions with students, there was unquestioning belief in it! The fact is, there’s a level of trust there between student-teacher telling them they are getting the right information. I think it shows how difficult changing technology makes it for academics (outside tech) to keep up.  That said, it’s a problem.

When they say “custom-built”, they are talking about in-house, from scratch software – think some proprietary system no one’s ever heard of.   Purchased applications would range from Quickbooks to SAP. Imagine. I feel like this is something that entered the course curriculum at its inception back when code was being written using Hieroglyphics. Am I wrong?

This actually ties nicely in with my last post about Legacy IT Systems. We’re still dealing with them. We’re also dealing with a Legacy Education System. This could explain some of the continuing difficulties between CFOs and CIOs.

There are lots of folks in accounting doing the right things though. Look at AICPA and CPA2Biz’s just-announced alliance with the software as a service accounting package, Intacct. Here’s an example of keeping current! Of course, in general it’s tough for professional bodies to do this kind of endorsement. What I like about it though is the endorsement of the technology. Maybe the question is, does that validation extend to the course curriculum for prospective accountants?

What do you think?

I think it also exemplifies the Echo Chamber analogy.  Who’s in your Echo Chamber?  Who’s not?

Related posts:

1. Ghost of Software Salesguys Past
2. Developers of Crystal Reports software launch new business intelligence venture
3. Asset or Expense: How do you account for Data Quality?

As George Akerlof and Robert Shiller discuss in their widely acclaimed book, Animal Spirits (How Human Psychology Drives The Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism),

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives, of sequences of events with an internal logic and dynamic that appear as a unified whole.  In turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework for motivation.  Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories…. Great leaders are first and foremost creators of stories.”

Think about the stories that define your life.  How do these stories influence your perspective?  How do they influence how you see yourself?  What are the stories that resonate most strongly in your life?  What stories do you choose to relate to other people?  There’s a growing body of knowledge, that aligns with the passage above, saying these stories are fundamental to the formation of our identities.  This is a powerful thought.

Yet, traditionally in accounting and finance, stories are an afterthought.  We are taught to focus on the numbers.  We create the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement in accordance with GAAP, leaving storytelling to the sales and marketing departments.  My experience has been that it’s very difficult to generate engagement through the use of the financial reports, and in retrospect, I think it’s for this reason.

There’s a reason why people say the Notes To The Financial Statements will tell you “where the bodies are buried”.  The reason is that only in The Notes do we find stories.

From a regulatory perspective, for external reporting we’re fairly hog-tied as to what we can do.  GAAP is king.  These constraints are institutionalized and provide a structural grounding for capital markets that is required for a host of reasons.

Internal reports, on the other hand, present a tremendous opportunity to begin using stories to provide context and colour to business results.  This is the area of accounting and finance where we can really affect some change NOW by bringing life to the numbers.

In the following clip, Ira Glass (son of an accountant and award winning host of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio) describes using anecdotes to convey ideas and says,

“the power of the anecdote is so great, no matter how boring the material is, if it’s in a story form where there’s an anecdote happening,  it has a momentum in and of itself… like being on a train that has a destination”

(hat tip to Presentation Zen blog for a good post on this same clip)

Ira Glass summarizes the process of telling a story as:

1. Start with an action

2. Raise a question from the beginning (the bait)

3. Answer the question

4. Repeat

5. Moment of Reflection (the “why”)

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Running the gauntlet of Year End Business Reporting
2. Accounting for I.T. in the Finance Department
3. Improving Your Month-end Throughput

“Buy the ticket, take the ride” – Hunter S. Thompson

Now, this isn’t a critique of the inevitable conflicts (real and perceived) inherent between these various groups.  Nor is it a post about the differences between Accounting and Marketing.  In order to do that, I am missing one critical piece.  My good friend Dan’s “Top Ten Differences between Accounting and Marketing List“.  Maybe with your help, readers, we can convince him to give it up.  Add your thoughts in the comments section!

NO.  This post is about posing a simple question:

How are your Year End spreadsheets doing?

Year End is upon us!  Everyone knows, thanks to these accounting blogs:

• Look at Last Year’s File
• Accounting Nation
• Accounting WEB
• CPA Trendlines
• re: The Auditors
• Junior Deputy Accountant (warning: Language)
• and Going Concern

Everyone knows that Audit Professionals have been raked over the coals of more stringent regulation and oversight the past few years (for all the good it’s done!).  And, if my experience is at all representative of our collective experience on the industry side, the auditors have been passing all of that regulation onto you!

Preferred method of passing = The Paddle

The paddle will be heading your way again soon enough.  Time to rollover all those Year End files and clean up for prepping 2009’s close.  The rigors of financial reporting compliance are staring us right in the face once again.  Oh, and Merry Christmas by the way.

Of course, I think that if the past 2 year’s have taught us anything, it’s that regulation is ineffective in preventing fraud.  I would like to know where Frank Abagnale jr. stands on this issue.  Abagnale is the character upon which the movie Catch Me If You Can is based and for the past 35 years he’s been helping the FBI, businesses, and government cope with matters of fraudulent activity.  I highly recommend his book, Art of The Steal, for anyone interested in learning more about specific industry-related fraud risk.

Ultimately, prevention is the key; and if that’s true, historical financial reports will never fulfill that role.  I realize that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but my view is that (anecdotally) auditors are getting hung up on details that bear little or no relation to the real risks.  Reason has been traded for checklists.

Be that as it may, you guys are still going to be toiling over this stuff, at their mercy, in the very near future.  At the same time, you will be expected by your management team to provide ACTUAL insight into the ACTUAL operations of your ACTUAL business.

Operations.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  Here is where you can’t “juke the stats“.  Yet, due to the pressures around the financial reports (case in point above), our operations reports are given second billing (if that – after payroll, A/R and collections, admin, etc).  To give you an idea of how much they are marginalized, there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Operations Reports!

I don’t see the issue with the auditors changing or going away anytime soon.  For me, there’s no reason to be optimistic or to engender optimism in you regarding that!  This is the system we live with for the moment.

Operations Reporting has to find a way to fit within the time constraints given these other pressures.  Either it fits in by 1) doing less or 2) doing more in less time.  How would you prefer to deal with your Operations Reports?

Do you have questions about the difference between Financial Reports and Operations Reports?  What are your views with respect to how this all fits together?  Let us know in the comments (and don’t worry, no salesperson will visit you).

When you talk about the true viability of the business, what does it really mean?

Closing links:

• Here’s a great segment talking about why we should question Ratings Agencies
• Embedded copy of IDCs Predictions for 2010

Enjoy!

Top 10 IT Predictions for 2010

Related posts:

1. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
2. The Roots of Business Reporting Technology
3. The Importance of Stories

At the time, I replied,

“Well if that’s the case, if Sales are the waitresses of the business, than Accountants are the dishwashers.”

I was Controller at the time.

You might think the worst aspect of washing dishes, I’m talking commercially here, is the fact you are cleaning up other people’s messes.  I don’t think it is.  I think the worst part is mind-numbing repetition.

Welcome to hell. Population: You

As Guy Forsyth (singer/actor) famously says in the movie, Waking Life:

“Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.”

That kind of repetitious work.

If, by the end of preparing your report, you find yourself never wanting to set eyes upon the thing again, you’re a dishwasher my friend.

One job I had, I was actually “trained“ to print off a paper copy of a report from our accounting system in order to then physically key punch the numbers into, not one, but 2 excel spreadsheets.  Every. Single. Month.  This wasn’t twenty years ago, this was 3 years ago.

That was a dishwasher moment for me.  Does my report have insight and analysis?  Does it tell the story of the business?  WHO CARES!!!!  I want this report out of my sight!

Now, I know I’m not supposed to tell you to buy our product.  I know that.  PT Barnum must be spinning in his grave with the rise of the “don’t be salesy” philosophy – particularly prevalent in social media circles.  It was the style at the times… is what we’ll say looking back years from now.  PT Barnum was, of course, one of the greatest self-promoters of all times.  He famously said, “Without promotion something terrible happens… Nothing!”.  He also said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

So, this is me not selling saying, we can show you how to get rid of your dishwasher jobs.  A few walkthroughs over the phone with our guys to get you set up and your dishwashing days are over.  At least, with respect to certain repetitious report creation tasks.  When you can’t get the report you need without putting in some serious dishwashing time and think, “there must be a way” then you’re likely in a position where a call with us could help you.

As PT Barnum also famously said,

“Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done.”

Now, this is a Friday post, so in the tradition of Fun Friday check out these clips once the office has cleared out.  The first is easily the best dishwasher quit scene ever made from a little known animated classic called American Pop.  The second is a clip from the aforementioned Waking Life; another classic (non-dishwashing related).

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Running the gauntlet of Year End Business Reporting
2. The Roots of Business Reporting Technology
3. Quarter End Reporting – A Time for Reflection

Malaspina Strait, British Columbia, Canada

Data Quality really is one of those topics that tends to lurk under the surface – elusive to capture.  We are talking about “the state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness, and accuracy that makes data appropriate for a specific use” (definition courtesy of the Government of British Columbia).  Or if you prefer, there’s the Dragnet definition: “Just the facts”.  For accountants, we are talking about all that stuff we enter into our systems (or gets generated by other systems) that we need to access later for producing reports and analysis.  The Data Quality refers to how effectively we can gain access to and generate meaning from these volumes.

A great deal of energy tends to go into our design of ways for inputting data.  How much thought has gone into the processes designed for getting the data back out?

According to IDC, a leading technology research firm, very few companies have systems in place to make use of their data, and [they] often struggle to classify data in order to find it again.  There’s a great quote on the V3 blog from Benjamin Woo at IDC:

“The key is to take the data and make money from it”

I think that this frames the issue in language we can understand.  We incur costs for gathering, processing, and storing data.  We may even incur further costs cleansing, reworking, and managing the stores of data.  What does the data do for us?  Are we developing an asset that creates future value?  Or, are we plugging an expense?

As I alluded to with my “fish out of water” comment, the answers to these questions are deeper than can be fathomed in this brief forum.  Today, I would like to simply skip a stone across the surface from the safety of shore.

An introduction to the formal world of Data Quality is the real goal for this post.  I’m not the expert.  These guys are the experts (a couple of them anyways):

• TDWI: The Data Warehousing Institute is where business and technical professionals come together to gain knowledge and skills through education and research programs relating to the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Industry.  These guys are leaders in the field and have a ton of resources you may find useful.
• IAIDQ: The International Association for Information and Data Quality is a not-for-profit, vendor-neutral professional society of people passionate about improving information and data quality.  They have a fantastic glossary of terms you may find very useful!

These two groups provide a jumping off point.  I don’t think, as accountants, we can be expected to become Data Quality experts.  The constraints of time and inclination stack up against it as well they should.  But, I do think that it’s in our best interest to familiarize ourselves with their world a bit so we can speak intelligently about these matters and gain some measure of insight that can help produce more value from the data we compile.

One quick example

Domain Value Redundancy: A dysfunctional characteristic of an attribute or field in which the same fact of information is represented by more than one value. For example, unit of measure code having domain values of “doz,” “dz,” and “12″ may all represent the fact that the unit of measure is “one dozen.” (Larry English)

What input fields in your systems give the user discretion with respect to the input values?

I live in Mount Pleasant.

I live in Mt. Pleasant.

I live in Mt Pleasant.

You can see how, once these various spellings get into the database, it becomes much more difficult to generate aggregate data without going in and mucking around.  Getting it right the first time is a key issue, but that’s a topic for another post.

Parting Shot

Here are some fun facts to leave you with today, just to give you an idea about the nature of the Data Quality professional:

• Wednesday, November 11, 2009 was World Quality Day.  I bet you didn’t know that. World Quality Day was established by the United Nations in 1990 to raise awareness of how quality approaches can have a tangible effect on business success.
• Right now among the Data Quality community, they are engaged in a “Blogging Olympics” dubbed, “Three Single Versions of a Shared Version of the Truth”.  My favourite post so far is the one arguing that the “single version of the truth” mindset is inherently flawed and should be considered the “one lie strategy”.

These are the guys we need to engage.  Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Automate your data uploads
2. Software Implementation by the Book
3. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job

(There are number of definitions out there, but I think the above serves the purpose)

There’s a lot of Buzz around the concept of Design Thinking at the moment.  A great deal of content has been produced, but I’m not sure how much has been directed toward the accounting and finance community.  During the past 2 years for us, listening to someone talk about “radical innovation” usually entailed mostly hand-wringing and, well, … expletives.  It’s understandable to have missed some of this.

So, I’m not sure how much about the topic has filtered in.  Maybe that’s a good discussion point for the comments:

• How much of the Design Thinking paradigm has filtered into the accounting and finance community?
• How applicable is this school of thought to accounting and finance?
• Do you believe there is a place for Design Thinking in accounting?

I’m interested in “jumping in” because I think there’s a natural connection between the way of thinking that underlies Design Thinking and the way of thinking underlying big parts of accounting.

The three main activities of Design Thinking are actually used extensively in our field.

I think we can all relate to:

1. The Mystery: pondering questions to enhance understanding of what is, or has, happened

2. Developing a Heuristic: a rule of thumb that helps narrow the field of inquiry and work the mystery down to a manageable size

3. The Algorithm: formal system for managing knowledge

We might consider this process when reviewing month end variances, or considering an asset’s useful life for amortization purposes.  Maybe we are reconciling transactions, ascertaining fair value, or while planning business combinations.  There’s an investigative nature to accounting that requires these critical thinking activities.  Maybe it’s something we wish we did more of.  Maybe these lessons bear repeating.

Viewing it from this perspective, the accounting and finance functions are subject to the same pressures affecting any other group as we try to balance the broader vision with our day-to-day routines.  When does the complacency of routine dull us to the level of engagement required to maintain the effectiveness of our critical thinking?

The choice is between being truly able to internalize this active, participatory way of thinking; or, just looking in the file for what was done last year.

Roger Martin (Thought Leader in the field and Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto) cautions against casual use of the term, Design Thinking, when he was questioned recently by Nora Young on CBC’s Spark podcast.

She closes the interview with this:

Nora Young: The other part of me, the cynic, thinks ‘this is just another management buzzword’.  How do you get people to take this really seriously and do the kinds of stuff that’s really required to rebuild the organization rather than just paying lip service to it?

Roger Martin: Well, I think it already has passed into management buzzword; right so, and I think this has happened many times before, where the world of business gets excited about some concept and typically that concept has some validity and some utility; but then, it gets pushed far beyond what it should have… and lots of people who know nothing about it actually hop into the terrain and it gets diluted…

If it hasn’t already happened with Design Thinking, it will.  I don’t have rose-coloured glasses on about that phenomenon.

You can see that Martin differentiates between the inevitable decline into buzzword status of “Design Thinking” with the value of the concepts at its core.

Let’s look at the core stuff while accepting the dilution of the term.  And, if Martin has no illusions, neither should I:

I could be one of the very people Martin warns of.

In my view, the core concepts are more foundational, more universal; this construct of Design Thinking is just the shiny, new wrapper.  The way of thinking that underlies the theory is the critical component.  What it’s called tends to change, but what’s required to make it happen does not.

Peter Senge, author of the well known management book, The Fifth Discipline, and Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management sums it up in an exchange with another management guru, Bill O’Brien (deceased), ex-CEO of Hanover Insurance here:

Peter Senge: If everybody thinks this is so great, how come it doesn’t exist?

Bill O’Brien: We have no idea the kind of commitment required.

In this exchange, they are referring to the management paradigm of their day, Systems Thinking (circa 1990). The difficulty in achieving benefits from these theories turns out to be every bit as universal as the underlying concepts.

The equation is, easier said than done multiplied by talk is cheap.  Without action, nothing happens.  Without action, regardless of whether we talk about Systems Thinking or Design Thinking, it’s “just another management buzzword”.

In Systems Thinking, it’s about exploring patterns of interdependency, dispelling the myth that we are all highly independent.  A lot of it involves the same stuff as Design Thinking; asking questions, revising assumptions, understanding relationships.

Think: Action

The Design Thinking model is really well defined in this excerpt from the Noise Between Stations blog:

Based on a review of writing on the topic, I have synthesized for myself what I understand design thinking to be…

Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement

Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems

Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk

Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved

Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages

Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions

Read more: http://noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/?page_id=1688#ixzz0WPzb9vRa

This is all substance over form stuff.  How does stuff actually get done?  What happens when what something is called does not match what it is?  How does structure influence behaviour? And vice versa.

We know about this stuff, but don’t always think actively about it.

What’s our next move?

As a group, it’s our responsibility to take the lead on innovating our financial and managerial reporting and accounting systems.  I’m mainly referring to Operations Reporting here; but quite frankly, I think Financial Reporting could use a look too.  How can we more effectively achieve our reporting goals while enhancing value for users?  Where is optimal value and how does that value point change over time?

The following clip is Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, discussing Design Thinking.  I encourage you to watch and then think about how Design Thinking can be applied in our field.

Roger Martin on Tim Brown:

“he’s great at designing relationships with his clients, ways of getting stuff to actually happen”

Share your thoughts in the comments!

Remember; the links throughout the article lead to additional content if you want to learn more.

Related posts:

1. Accounting for I.T. in the Finance Department
2. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT
3. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT Part 2

In my introductory post, I mentioned that this blog was going to have an experimental element.  Well, the experimentation has begun.

It’s time to switch up a variable.  The variable: Time.  Your time.

Time is a commodity.  It is scarce, finite, and valuable.  In exchange for your time, we are required to provide content of equal value – a fair exchange.

With this bargain in mind, we are contemplating the change.

Providing high value content requires research, editing; and of course, time (our time).  There is a fantastic quote on the Open Forum blog that speaks to the point:

“As we become collectors of data rather than thinkers and reflectors about content and implications, we are correspondingly investing less and less in creating information in the first place. The sheer pressure to get a daily post on line precludes in-depth research and analysis, or at best reduces us to recycling the same set of ideas in another package.”

We’ve all heard the term Information Overload.  This refers to an excess amount of information that impedes understanding.  A term we may not be quite as familiar with is, Tragedy of the Commons. This refers to a dilemma in which multiple individuals, acting in their own self-interest, will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is in no one’s long term interest for this to happen.  In my view, there’s a lot of that occurring online today.

The Soapbox Derby that is Information Superhighway has become a traffic jam.  Soapbox, as in we’re all standing on our soapboxes voicing our opinions like back in the day; and Derby, as in we’re all in a race like kids zooming down a hill in homemade racers.

The result of this traffic jam is that the value in driving becomes greatly reduced.  If we’re sitting in traffic, we aren’t going to see anything new.  We aren’t getting anywhere!  We aren’t going to stay interested in driving.  It becomes a chore, something to be avoided.  A necessary evil.  Personally, I take public transit but that’s beside the point.

Getting back to the point.  In my view, focusing on velocity of posts at the expense of depth is a poor bargain.

We want to provide unique, insightful, engaging, and deep content in this forum that stands the test of time.

Your time.

With that in mind, we are moving to a once a week posting format for my blog.  Look for new content here every Wednesday.

Does that sound like a fair deal?

Related posts:

1. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT
2. Accounting for Interdepartmental Language Barriers – Accounting and IT Part 2
3. Bringing Design Thinking to Accounting and Finance