The CPA’s Call to Action
Business intelligence is no longer an isolated technology used by the IT department to produce reports. Since the key focus of BI is supporting analyses (a core competency of accounting) and performance management, we need to take ownership of enabling and supporting BI within our firms, companies or our client’s/customer’s organizations.
CPAs should start by working with business units to identify the information needed to support and monitor business processes. This usually starts by looking at the information needed to support decision making – where does the data come from and how is it used? Another perspective is to look at key metrics of business processes that should be monitored and the acceptable range for each metric. We also can approach this from the internal audit perspective. What are the control points in a process and what data conditions identify an exception has occurred?
Once all of these requirements are identified, we should work with IT to develop a strategy for getting the data needed into the BI Platform. During this phase, we should review the processes and algorithms used to gather, compile and move data from operational data sources (transactional systems) into the BI Platform, ensuring that data quality (accuracy, correctness and completeness) is maintained.
To enable the business units to use the data, the proper reports or alerts must be configured in the Analytic Applications. Most modern Analytic Applications have Microsoft Excel-like functionality, making it easy for a non-techie to develop reports and wizard-type step-by-step configurations supporting the setup of alerts so that we can perform most of these tasks by ourselves.
Lastly, here’s the step most commonly forgotten and the most critical. We should work with the business units to help them understand how to work with the reports or alerts and understand the information being presented. Operational people may not have the background or knowledge to be able to understand what a report is telling them. Training them to understand what they’re reading, and helping them to understand what affect their work has the on numbers in the reports, is what really empowers them to take action. Remember that the endpoint goal is to enable people to make informed, proactive decisions, quickly, at all levels of the organization.
CPAs also should partner with the IT Department to ensure the risks from the BI technical architecture are properly managed. As decision makers come to rely on the information provided by BI processes, we need to work with IT to ensure that systems are properly backed up and business continuity measures are put in place to prevent BI system downtime. And, of course, we should review the logical access controls over the BI data since the information often contains competitive intelligence that should only be accessed by those with proper authorization (for a related story on access controls, see Janis Wong’s article in this issue of InfoTech Update).