BI and better business decisions

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 11, 2012

Last week marked my four year anniversary with SAS, and I have to admit that prior to joining, the phrase “business intelligence” was not in my vocabulary.  I understood “analytics” just fine, and knew long before my hiring interview that it definitely didn’t mean spreadsheets.  I knew what “performance management” [...]

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Conversational analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 28, 2012

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus.  But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than [...]

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Can you draw this dog?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 14, 2012

If you ask any four year old, and I know this for a fact since I once taught preschool, if you ask any four year old if they can draw, sing or dance, they will look at you as if you had lost your mind.  OF COURSE they can draw / sing [...]

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Finance in more than two dimensions

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 1, 2012

I have been attending corporate financial management conferences for 20 years or more now, and there has been one consistent theme that has managed to survive the decades intact: how can finance and its FP&A function become more strategic, more focused on value-add decision support, and less transaction/ journal entry oriented, [...]

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Metrics for the subconscious organization

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 17, 2012

Think about what it’s like to learn to ride a bicycle, or play the piano, or hit a fast ball, or to coach a group of middle schoolers to do the same. If asked to explain how you stay balanced on a bicycle, you probably couldn’t do it. If you [...]

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Data + Context = Business Intelligence

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 13, 2011

“Our performance last month was 46.” Oh, you don’t have to thank me, I was just doing my job. Not very well, I might add. 46? 46 what? Or 46 who’s? Without context, 46 is just a number, just data. In context, perhaps that’s 46 out of 48 (not too [...]

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Curling

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 27, 2011

Not what you were expecting, was it? You open up a business blog only to find an article about that relatively minor winter sport we only get to see once every four years during the Olympics, two dozen ESPN channels not withstanding. But curling it is, and for good reason. [...]

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North Pole, Inc.

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|December 15, 2010

(the following transcript was obtained through Santaleaks; all “naughty” identities have been redacted.) S. Clause [SC]: Performance Management plays a significant role here at North Pole, Inc., although in a somewhat targeted manner, with us being a non-profit and all. Remember, though, “non-profit” doesn’t mean “no-profit”, it just means our [...]

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What’s a Budget for?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 18, 2010

With the exception of the occasional James Bond movie that proves the rule, we don’t as a matter of course combine our modes of transportation into one all-purpose vehicle, and we even tend to park our cars, boats and planes in separate facilities. But when it comes to financial management, [...]

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Want to add Value? There's an App for that!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 5, 2010

The goal among finance management professionals for as long as I’ve been in the business has been how to move their group’s effort from being primarily transaction oriented towards adding more value in the decision support arena, moving from an 80/20 weighting in favor of transactions to 80/20 in favor [...]

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