Key information on a real-time (or right-time) basis inches closer.
Technology providers—those for enterprise platforms in particular—have hyped the idea of the real time enterprise for over a decade. No longer would executives need to wait for static reports to be prepared and disseminated—often with incomplete, outdated or inaccurately interpreted data—to make decisions. They could instead consult a dashboard that would feed them the data in real time. These ideas are getting a renewed push, according to a recent report by Sameer Patel with the technology analysis beta sight Gigaom Pro, under the umbrella of “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications that promise real-time communication and collaboration based on openly shared data. As treasury has not been immune from these trends in the past, it should not ignore the implications of this latest wave of real-time enterprise thinking.
For instance, many treasury departments stepped up their reporting to senior management and the board on a wide variety of subjects in response to the financial crisis. Preparing these reports has become tedious and somewhat unproductive in some instances, as the financial crisis and board interest in treasury metrics wanes. Instead of cutting back on such reports altogether, might treasury like to create a dashboard that provides key information on a consistent basis, automatically, to those who want to view it, and even comment on it? And wouldn’t treasury like such as dashboard view of its own? Sure, if it were available.
Various efforts have been made by providers, from enterprise platforms like SAP and Oracle to banks like Citi (Treasury Vision), seeking to give treasurers a dashboard-like view things like global cash balances, available working capital, incoming or outgoing liquidity and even underlying FX exposure (see FireApps) with varying degrees of success and freshness of data. And such efforts will surely continue with new takes and emphasis.
Integrated into these dashboards going forward according to Mr. Patel will be the new enterprise communication and collaboration tools (borrowing from social networking) that promise better productivity and innovation based on the collective wisdom of professionals across functions. Microsoft’s SharePoint, IBMs Lotus Connections, Google Wave and a host of other providers are already in this space, though perhaps not for treasury use.
From a treasury management perspective, treasurers should take Mr. Patel’s advice and get ahead of “the widespread proliferation of real-time tools in the enterprise” by conducting “concerted analysis of what process and information flows truly warrant real time access.” He also points to the notion of “right time” vs. “real time,” which will make it more important for organizations to decide what consumption models work best for individual decision makers and the tasks they are responsible for.
Whereas in the past, the speed of “real time” was sufficiently limited by how fast traditional applications in the enterprise were able to process and publish information, he expects the increasing existence of extensible APIs to now make it easier than ever to tap into multiple systems to extract information as soon as it’s made available. Thus, the “right time” decision of when to make information available, and to whom, is becoming ever more important, especially if the current technology trends start with a mindset of making information accessible (and to everyone) as soon as its input.