Talking to a lot of different parties in the world of audit, performance management and governance, I'm surprised about the isolated approach to these topics most are still taken. Specialist solutions for things like KPI-dashboards, Basel-III compliancy and  general ledger analyzers are being offered in abundance. For me the three elements can't be seen in isolation and thus investments in this area should focus on combined solutions.

I'm a member  of a network of "50-Plus" professionals, focusing on translating our experience into formats that relate to today's business needs. A group member asked me about my vision on coaching senior management and how this differs from what is generally offered today. My observations on coaching today and tomorrow.

Some months ago I contemplated about the often asked question: "What are you doing at the moment?". Consequently I summarized my activities as being that of a solution broker: offering a possible solution to an opportunity or for a problem. But what about the format of offering this brokerage? Traditional per hour paid business consultant? Or are there more effective ways of offering solutions?

While talking to people about the blog on minimizing process exceptions, there was a general recognition of the usefulness of this approach. Examples of process exceptions and their impact on the business were easy enough understood. But one additional element was touched that needs to be discussed separately: the analysis of false positives.

Over the years in many blogs we addressed the need for simple and transparent KPI's that follow closely the organizations objectives. Almost always the actual measure is based upon the actual achieving (of a percentage) of the set business goal. But there is an inverted option to get to this: the minimization of process exceptions. And with maybe an even better result.

If you haven't seen somebody for some time, the logical question you get asked is: "And what are you doing at the moment?". Normally I will give some examples of what I'm doing or involved with. But since I seem to do quite some things in parallel it gets quite messy, letting to a response that I seem to be "quite busy" and often enough killing the conversation. So time to address this differently. As of now I'm an Information Broker!

Our business IT landscape is becoming more complex by the day. Partly because of new technologies and ongoing systems integration but more so due to governance legislation and accountability rules. The CFO is in an awkward position here: the need to know as quickly as possible what went good and wrong versus the reality of delayed aggregated reporting.

For his strategic planning and innovation charter, a CIO has to look 5 years ahead. Crushed between uncertain future demand of the own organization and the need for (far reaching) decisions today, a strategic outlook on IT may help. Although this is not an insurance policy, at least it gives the CIO the much needed option to be pro-active. But what predictions to follow?

Reading a press coverage of a survey amongst 2000 CIO's worldwide by Harvey Nash made me almost choke in my coffee. One of the outcomes was that CIO's fear that the lack of ICT innovation will lead to declining market share of their company. Well this is in line with what I've been advocating for years. What really disturbed me is that a very large portion of the CIO's admit to have no charter or even influence to innovate.

In a previous blog a gave my analysis of the reasons why starting a study and career in ICT is not attractive for today’s students.  Now is is time to address potential solutions to resolve this problem.