Business Intelligence / Analytics,

Digitalisierung

From „Lord of the Numbers“ to „Lord of the Data“

From „Lord of the Numbers“ to „Lord of the Data“

Gysler Thomas
by Prof. Dr. Thomas Gysler, Lecturer at the Institute of Financial Services Zug IFZ

A short reflection about the impact of digitalization on the sphere of a controller’s activity.

The current wave of digitalization will impact the purview of the controller significantly. Those controllers who have been focussed on financials and management accounting will find themselves challenged by their superiors, as the demand for integrated information across the whole business is rapidly increasing. To be able to supply this kind of information, the necessary data needs to be available in good quality. So the controller has to ensure, that all the relevant IT systems of an organization deliver compatible and consistent data. Failure to do so will increase the cost of information and limit the effectiveness of the controllers’ work.  The main challenges will be the „Amount of data“, „Compatibility“, and „Consistency“.

Amount of data
Modern industrial equipment is able to generate and supply loads of data about its activities. The responsibility to integrate such an amount of data into the company’s data architecture cannot be left exclusively to the IT specialists any more. IT is able to collect, store and safeguard the data. But only the controller can integrate the data into an overall picture, can convert data into information. This means to link „technical“ data to „financial“ and „operational“ data, to support important tasks like pricing, supply chain management, dynamic warehousing or simply depreciation. Data mining and other techniques that can be applied to the task are already available.

Compatibility
The focus of this article is not on technical compatibility, but on the logical one. The exact same things have to be measured consistently at every site of the enterprise. Else the data cannot be consolidated, is flawed and loses its value. Here the tasks range from defining a common accounting policy to making different charts of accounts match, from clearly defining the products to assigning the necessary cost and revenue.

Consistency
A business’ system and equipment need to be constantly updated. But a new procurement or cash management system will directly impact the data architecture which needs to be updated. This needs to be done in a way, that analysis using past and future data is possible, that there is no consistencies break.

To draw a conclusion, the modern controller needs to broaden its knowledge and activities into the fields of data architecture and data management. He will have to take the responsibility of monitoring the enterprises actions on a data level and converting that data into beneficial information.

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