Best Practices

Now is the time for the finance organization to step up to the challenges and become a strategic business partner in the deployment of profitability analysis across the enterprise. This requires a fundamental shift—in terms of both vision and execution. Tomorrow’s winners will be the ones that are not content simply to survive this economic onslaught, but work to emerge nimble enough to thrive. Profitability analysis is critical in this context. Read this whitepaper to learn more about profitability analysis and its benefits.

Profitability analysis is important to all companies. But in times of economic uncertainty, it becomes even more critical because organizations need a comprehensive and forwardlooking view of profitability to ensure that they can remain financially viable, whatever the economic circumstances. For companies to be successful, they need automated systems that enable interactive profitability analysis that can be shared across a broad swath of users. They also need robust, advanced analytics, to provide detailed granular metrics for assessing profitability and measuring performance. IBM offers solutions that can meet those needs.

When an unpredictable economy brings sudden shifts in revenues, costs, and profits, Software solutions can give Finance the ability to anticipate and adapt. But Finance needs the help of IT. Specifically, Finance needs the help of inspiring IT Managers who can lay out the roadmap that will take Finance from the automation of discrete processes to the broader task of transforming the business to compete successfully in a challenging global economy.

By identifying and addressing the symptoms of forecasting illness described in this paper, companies can enjoy the benefits of a health forecasting approach, which, along with specific case examples, will be discussed in future white papers within this series.

Predictable Financial and Operational Performance with Sustainable Compliance

In this white paper, we review the purposes of traditional planning, budgeting and forecasting, as well as common associated problems. We highlight improvements achieved through rolling forecasts and enumerate important rolling forecast “dos” and “don’ts.”

The current business environment is still characterized by skittishness, tenuous demand and sporadic growth. It’s no surprise then, that 60% of CFOs plan to make major changes to critical finance practices and processes, according to the 2010 IBM Global CFO Study. In fact, 70% of CFOs claim to be taking a more prominent role in enterprise decision making beyond the traditional role of finance. Yet many CFOs admit to significant gaps in their ability to deliver on this expanded agenda, particularly in their ability to measure and monitor business performance. The IBM study found that those companies that invest in capabilities to expand their business insight are better able to anticipate and react to the unpredictable external forces affecting the economy.

Since the idea of outsourcing applications development became popular in the past 20 years, much of that activity has taken place in geographies such as India, the Middle East and even Russia. Those regions have offered an abundant, increasingly tech-savvy labor force and relatively low labor rates. But for North American companies, outsourcing development of business-critical applications has proven problematic when working with developers so far removed from headquarters-based IT departments and those organizations’ user bases. Companies in the U.S., Canada and Mexico have been looking for “near-sourcing” partners that can meet – or even exceed – the technical benefits provided by outsourcing firms in other parts of the world, while delivering other tangible and intangible benefits. Here are three reasons why a near-sourcing strategy for applications development can make sense for your North American organization.

Providing a good online shopping experience starts with understanding customer needs and expectations in order to deliver suitable goods and services. Employees expect a similar experience with a Service Catalog. An effective business service catalog captures employee needs and communicates negotiated service offerings and service level agreements. However, hitting service level targets requires more than just listing services. It’s essential to provide an automated self-service portal and open communication.

Every enterprise relies upon multiple custom applications – to do things that you just can’t get packaged solutions to do and, in some cases, to provide competitive advantage. But those custom applications can be an Achilles heel as business needs and underlying technologies evolve. One size does not fit all, and not every available platform is appropriate for every custom application.

Learn how savvy enterprises, like Tickets.com, Verisign and Omnicare, use ServiceNow as a platform to enable business users to rapidly create applications with IT’s full guidance and support. During this webinar, you will discover how ServiceNow is enabling organizations to increase their competitive agility, user satisfaction and productivity, all while enhancing IT's value to the business.

Work.com (formerly Rypple) is part of the Salesforce.com family. This social performance management system is most commonly used by organizations looking to improve alignment, performance measurement, and employee motivation.

Work.com is the Sales Performance Management solution from Salesforce.com. Work.com helps sales organizations drive sales performance with real-time feedback, coaching, and shared goal setting. Salesforce Work.com drives constancy and reinforces winning behaviors on sales teams. Reps are more motivated. Onboarding time is reduced, and forecasting is more consistent. Sales output from each rep is increased through real-time coaching. Salesforce Work.com compliments the world class capabilities of Salesforce's Sales Cloud CRM solution.

The vision for Celent’s Model Bank research was to try to answer an apparently simple question: “What would it look like for a bank to do everything right with today’s technology?” Of course, the question is not nearly as simple as it appears. The terms “everything” and “right” will mean very different things to different banks depending on their size, the complexity of their operations and product sets, and their technological starting points. While there is no such thing as a “Model Bank”—every bank does some things well, and others not as well when it comes to technology—it is possible to conceive of a “Model Bank” through real world examples of effective usage of technology.

We all need to create professional looking PDF documents and forms for tasks such as document sharing, implementing workgroup collaboration, designing company forms, producing company collateral, finalizing agreements, applying digital signatures, converting hardcopy documents to softcopy, and document archiving.

This report, which is the vision report of the mobile app development playbook for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals, focuses on the changes application developers need to understand if they want to build modern applications that deliver contextual customer experiences.

Successful mobile apps, especially enterprise mobile apps, typically need to interact with a well-architected set of back-end services, but most mobile app developers are more skilled at client-side front-end development. Enter mobile back-end-as-a-service (BaaS), a new set of hosted platforms that addresses the gap between front-end development proficiency and back-end infrastructure requirements. Enterprise-class back-end-as-a-service addresses scalability while providing an integration platform into existing enterprise services. Use this research as your guidebook to navigating the emerging BaaS landscape.

As the volume of available data increases, and we have new ways of extracting insights from data, it is valuable to take a step back and examine the impact of these insights on integration and company actions. Join us for this webinar and learn how you can use big data in your organization.

Find out what IDC and Boston College have to say about enhancing user productivity, reducing application downtime by 67%, and a 6 months ROI. Using Riverbed Cascade to manage exponentially growing application complexity while increasing network uptime.

What are some of the pitfalls you can avoid when augmenting an existing infrastructure to maximize performance, results, and success? Read on.

Yapmo has taken The Walsh Group from having ideas bottled up in various regions to having free flowing approach where people can collaborate on suggestions throughout the company.

Learn how Loop + Video has enabled Hyatt to better engage with employees through their own private video sharing platform.

The average employee spends about 650 hours a year on email.

Learn how @Properties achieved major growth in efficiency and sales by cleaning up their email environment.

See what top industry voices have to say about Service Cloud vs outdated technologies.