Two weeks ago I would not have been able to see it so clearly!
The world is really becoming a much smaller place! Over the past two weeks I had the chance to attend SAP’s Sapphire in Orlando and GSMA’s Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai.
Big Data and Cloud were two common mainstream topics but the experiences were quite different.
SAP’s event is a world class affair that brings together its marketing machine and its happy customers (this was the impression I got) from across very different industries and different departments across their companies.
The GSMA’s event in Shanghai is still relatively young and is working towards achieving the same quality and depth of its older brother held every year in Barcelona. The conference aspect of the event was mainly dedicated to the GSMA members – Mobile Operators – but many fixed players, several banks - mainly related to mobile payments/banking and some highly interesting e-commerce/m-commerce players also attended.
Throughout both events we were reminded regularly that all of the football excitement in Brazil was just around the corner – and I must say it was very good to see all of the Portuguese flags and picture of Ronaldo everywhere!
Having watched the inaugural game between Brazil and Croatia - not that I wanted to watch it THAT much… Jet Lag made it impossible to sleep after 3:30am in Shanghai and the game started at 4am … - I have to say that there is a good chance that our customers during the last user group have identified the winner of this years’ tournament. Despite this, I have to agree with Croatia’s coach… (1) I did not see any penalty and (2) Brazil will not need that kind of help to win the tournament!
I find that this constitutes a great analogy for Enterprise Business Assurance, as the rate of change and the rate at which we do business is getting faster and faster.
Couldn’t someone have warned the referee at the time of that obvious mistake?
The same is happening across all industries: we see people on the playing field making mistakes that cost a lot in terms of reputation, cash and margin.
To be fair, both for governance and effectiveness reasons they can’t be the ones controlling their own activities. A referee cannot be doing his job and at the same time accessing the information from dozens of TV cameras! But, clearly some kind of “business assurance” team could support the referee, or the coach and even some of the players almost in real time! At least it could start with the key moments of any game… like penalty kicks and… people faking them.
Revenue Assurance, Fraud Management, Internal Auditing, Security, Compliance, Risk Management are some of those control teams in most industries (we call the overall remit Enterprise Business Assurance) but most of these teams are not yet ready for the level of quality, quantity, variety of information that can be accessed in real time or almost in real time. We are now also seeing hoards of external data coming to the table. Telecom operators, retailers, energy companies and any B2C industry that are already prepared for internal data, need now to be ready for this.
The rate of growth of data and the speed in which businesses change, means there is a demand for a new approach to both business operations and to business assurance across the enterprises!
This is something that was very clear for me in Orlando, in Shanghai, and watching a football game that took place in São Paulo!
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