The Financial Crisis - and what it means for Technology

October 16, 2008

The Financial Crisis - and what it means for Technology

For roughly the last 25 years, business has focused on growth - with technology its lens. As of Friday evening, September 12 2008, that focus turned abruptly to one of “all-out corporate cost containment." Until now, decision-support technologies (known as "Business Intelligence" and "Performance Management" systems in the IT world) have largely existed for the benefit of sales and customer-related growth-oriented activities. In fact, these environments lived on quite happily despite an uneasy, almost surreal, detachment from the world of true accounting debits and credits. As long as sales kept going up, conformity and harmonization between business intelligence systems and company financial statements “would always be nice,” but not critical. However, with cost containment now the goal, technical indifference to these less familiar (to IT, at least), perhaps less approachable financial accounting systems is no longer possible.

As this dramatic upheaval in the financial markets sets the stage, we now witness a seismic and historic transformation from...

“Technology for Growth Enablement” (R.I.P. 1982-2008)

to...

“Technology for Cost Containment” (2009-?)"

- Michael Zimmerman
Business Intelligence and Performance Management Consultant