Business intelligence technologies provide finance departments with historical, current, and predictive views of business operations based on integrated data from across the organization. This allows finance to move beyond reporting and into advising the business by revealing trends, patterns, and insights. For example, AT&T Mobility's finance department leverages a Teradata enterprise data warehouse to calculate the profitability of 80 million subscribers daily and identify any subscribers who churned so they can work to win them back. Implementing BI requires getting sponsorship, understanding needs, building partnerships, standardizing data, and delivering self-service tools and timely detailed data to support strategic financial analysis and decision making.

1. Business Intelligence Creates The New Role for
Finance:
Strategic Advisors

2. Slide presentation will be made available
electronically.

3. CBOS combines powerful information
technology tools with organizational
data, analytics and financial analysis
to optimize business decisions.

4. TDWI Tableau Software
CFO Magazine SAS Institute
Wayne Eckerson IBM
Tom Davenport B-eye Network
Gartner Group Forrester Research
IDC Wikipedia

5. Business Intelligence (BI)
.

6. Common functions of business
intelligence technologies are
reporting, online analytical
BI technologies provide historical, processing, analytics, data
current and predictive views of mining, process mining, complex
business operations. event processing, business
performance management,
benchmarking, text mining and
predictive analytics.

7. Historically, the finance
department has:
• kept the books
• managed the budget
• and looked after cash, capital, taxes,
treasury, and statutory reporting

8. Finance needs to move beyond data
collection and reporting to reveal trends,
patterns, and insights so it can advise
the business how best to improve
operations, optimize performance, and
adapt to the changing business
conditions.

10. Finance can be a powerful agent of organizational
change.
That’s because its sits at the information core of
organizations.
It collects financial and non-financial data from
every business unit on a regular basis and
consolidates that information.

12. The applications that run your
business on a day to day basis:
• General Ledger
• Order Entry
• Procurement
• CRM
• Weblogs
• Inventory Management Systems

13. Data
Integration
Data
Tools Dashboard, Predictive
Warehouse
•ETL Scorecards Analytics
Data Mart
•Data Quality
•Cleansing

14. Data
Visualization
Publishing to the
Data
web and mobile
Exploration
without IT
Personal Data
Dashboards Dictionary

15. Real life BI Environment
Accounting and
Operations
System
Tableau Server
Desktop
SQL Server
Repository / Data Dictionary
(Integration Services,
Analytical Services,
Reporting)
Project Plans
Web
Spreadsheets
Established data flow
Future planned data iPad
flow Desktop

16. Single Version of
Goal: Truth
Standardizing the
General Building an enterprise
Ledger/Chart of data warehouse
Accounts
Challenges Inconsistencies of
Terminology Across
Merging General the Organization
Inaccurate data Inconsistencies in data
Ledger with other •Define; Customer, Revenue,
Expense and Profit
data:

17. Mobile BI
Cloud-based BI
BI enabled Applications
Big Data
In some cases… the future is now!

18. Financial Reports
Plans and Budgets
Analysis and Models
Predictions
Profitability and Risk Analysis
360 degree views
Sub Area Metrics

20. Getting a sponsor,
finding and It starts at the top Understand the cost
understanding the pain
Funding and
Evangelizing the BI CFO certified metrics Accurate data lineage
initiative
Finance IT BI
business partnership
Change management •BI Center of Excellence with
member from across the
organization

21. Spreadmarts
Spreadsheets are a personal productivity tool not an enterprise
information delivery system.
Human data warehouses
So flexible and powerful that it has long been the go tool
reporting tool. Classic example Excel vs. Crystal Reports

22. The finance
department at AT&T
Mobility has benefited
from having a single
version of truth
delivered via a
Teradata enterprise
data warehouse .

23. “If you lost 1% of your
AT&T Mobility’s data customers yesterday,
warehouse calculates wouldn’t you like to
the profitability of all 80 know today who they
million subscribers are and whether there
every day. might a common theme
behind the churn?
With the data
warehouse, we can Having access to a
pinpoint those unified set of data has
subscribers and work changed the finance
proactively to win them department’s
back,” says a director of relationship with the
financial analysis at the business.
company.

24. Not the right level of detail (Finance’s tendency is to categorize
and summarize)
Accounting Cycles are “after the fact”
Data not synchronized with company business cycles can be
misleading.
Timeliness of data (Too little Too late)

25. Get a sponsor
Find and understand the pain
Partner with a BI Team
Homogenize the general ledger and chart of accounts
Build an enterprise data warehouse
Deliver self-service BI tools
Deliver timely and detailed data
Coexist with Excel
Create an ad hoc environment for financial analysis
Leverage the data warehouse to support other financial
applications.