COA Solutions - Business Accounting Software

I’ve just started reading ‘The Snowball’ the biography of Warren Buffett, ‘Oracle of Omaha’, written by Alice Schroeder. It’s difficult not to warm to a man who has such a down to earth approach to business and life. Who has an overwhelming desire to keep proving himself and who has a deep reverence for his father whom he felt the world had treated unjustly.

COA Solutions was very well represented last Thursday 30th October at the Sift Media Business Software Satisfaction Awards 2008 at the Brewery in London.

Recessions have an upside. No longer are dinner parties dominated by people telling you how, by the simple reason of staying alive they have miraculously increased the value of their house, the flats in the city centre and the little ‘bolt hole’ in France.

My colleague Glenn Hardy has written a piece for the Daily Telegraph Business Club which explains how Business Intelligence has widened and deepened into corporate performance management. You will have to register (it’s free) to read the article, but the Telegraph Business Club has enough in it to make it worthwhile.

My youngest daughter has always had, what my wife and I would call, a tidy mind and what people with a less intimate familial connection describe as an obsessive compulsive disorder. While other young girls were badgering their parents for the latest Barbie or for the latest doll that performed all number of bodily functions, we were persuaded to buy her a Dymo printer.

When I was 20 years old I received a devastating prediction. I would be boring, miserable and never have a meaningful relationship with a woman. If this prediction had been delivered by a wild black haired woman in a tent on a fairground I could have laughed it off. But no, this came with the full force of late 1970’s science and technology, printed on some green and white computer paper. It was the results from an aptitude test and the algorithm had determined that I should either be an accountant or work in computers. Friends had been given bits of paper with journalist, barrister, advertising executive and for one, who was a punk rocker, complete with bondage gear, very improbably, a vicar. All seemed worthwhile and interesting jobs. I saw myself as someone destined to change the world, not reconciling expenses and playing Dungeon and Dragons in the evening.

“Tell me again, what is it that you actually do for a living?” Asked my Dad for the umpteenth time. For an 80 year old who left school at 14 and worked until he was 75 with racehorses, he found it difficult to get to grips with how someone like me spends his day and why any sane person would pay me to do it. At the end of the conversation, he remarked, exasperated, “that doesn’t sound like work, it sounds like pinching money”.

Being a consultant is like being a eunuch in a harem.

You get to see all the action but don’t have the wherewithal to get involved. Sometimes you wistfully think about what you would do if you were running the organisation. What if the day-dream came true? Well it turns out that you have less and less time to make a difference and this day-dream may quickly turn into a nightmare.

According to Mark Gottfredson, Steve Schubert and Hernan Saenz in their February 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘The New Leaders Guide to Diagnosing The Business’ they pointed out that 1 in 5 of the CEOs who left their jobs in 2006 had only been in position for 8 months. This is hardly enough time to get your new office furniture, the corner room redecorated and your Blackberry fully functional.

Business Intelligence is a misnomer.

A lot of implementations that I see, and the discussions that I have with practitioners who have implemented them, seem to offer little to the business and display only a passing acquaintance with anything that could remotely be termed as intelligence.