Recently, I have encountered a lot of discussions within the finance (FP&A) professionals community about business partnering. The challenge in such discussions is to move from theoretical reasoning into practical execution.  In this article, I would like to talk about one possible area where cooperation between FP&A and Data management professionals can deliver mutually beneficial results.

Most large and medium-size companies are within ecosystems with increasing complexity and evolutions speed. Globalisation, regulations, technological changes, competitor moves, innovations, customer demands change and few others are the source of this increase in complexity and change speed.

In our earlier blogs we have discussed the role of data in your profession, your main benefits from proper managing of data, as well your main concerns about data. In this one I would like to give you a few practical tips on how to ensure getting the ‘right’ data.

Data management is a business function that, in my opinion, every company should have. Still, often it is not the case. Managing data means that everybody in a company knows what data they (can) get and have a good understanding of what can it can be used for. It also means receiving data when and where it is needed. And finally, producing and working with data of acceptable quality.

Very often financial and business planning professional ask the same question: which software do I need to improve my business and financial planning and analysis capabilities? The answer is not straightforward.

According to a 2017 IBM report, "Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. To put that into perspective, 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." Those are some pretty staggering figures and businesses see the volume of their internally generated data growing all the time.