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Accelerating business decision making with IBM Planning Analytics: A unique perspective

By Errol Brandt posted Thu October 12, 2023 05:42 AM

  

Throughout my career, I've flipped between finance roles and IT roles. I've designed and implemented systems, and I've used and managed systems. It's given me a unique perspective on business analytics, seen from both sides of the coin.

Business analytics should be the "brains" of the organization. It's the home of the practices and processes that integrate information to support business decision-making. Whether it's cost accounting, revenue accounting, or budgeting and forecasting, business analytics is the place where data, information, and knowledge coalesce into actionable insights.

In many organizations, business analytics is still regarded as an "IT" activity, which, in my view, is the worst place for it!!  Traditional tools are often technically brilliant but commercially flawed, and hopelessly slow to be delivered. Occasionally, you'll see business analytics as a "finance" activity. This too can be bad if the users are not empowered with the right tools.

Having seen the arguments from both sides, my conclusion is that business analytics is a unique activity that sits squarely between the two. It's not accounting, it's not programming, it's data science; and the people who thrive in this zone are both technically competent and commercially astute.

IBM Planning Analytics bridges these two worlds seamlessly. It empowers business users to understand their data in ways that are simply not possible with spreadsheets, and gives expert users the tools they need to create their own sophisticated analytical models. There are few business problems that can't be solved with IBM Planning Analytics. 

In the rapidly evolving landscape of data and AI, I hope more organizations come to this conclusion as well. Businesses need to make decisions quickly, and it makes no sense to bottleneck the organization: Teach the accountant how to handle data, don't try to teach the programmer to become an accountant. And the best way to do that is with tools like IBM Planning Analytics.

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Wed November 15, 2023 10:19 AM

As a long time user of Planning Analytics, I completely agree with your assessment.

Business analytics, and in particular tools such as Planning Analytics, are appropriately the bridge the IT and Finance world.   This makes organizations more efficient, and empowers users to gain insights into their data - enabling quicker and more effective decision making