COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

From electronic data interchange (EDI) to customer relationship management (CRM), IT directors were keen to talk up the importance of their latest three-letter acronym-based project. Top of these initiatives came enterprise resource planning (ERP), an all-encompassing approach to resource management.

Yesterday I read the MacLeod review on employee engagement, ‘Engaging for Success’ . It bought to mind my experience as a Sunday footballer. Much of the time I played in teams who were at the bottom or close to the bottom of the league. Getting out of bed on a Sunday morning was miserable. The pitches were always too wet or too hard. The knocks always hurt. And what has this got to do with David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s report? Well, it reminded me that when I played in a team that did very well, funnily enough getting out of bed was easy, the pitches were great and it was easy to shrug off bumps and bruises. Under all the criteria of engagement I would say that I was much more engaged when we were winning.

One area of business intelligence that is getting more and more attention is decision making. We are capable of processing huge amounts of data now with very sophisticated software, but as we have seen in the Financial Sector, the most sophisticated user of information, there can still be cataclysmic repercussions.

One of the questions that always goes through my mind when I am on a plane waiting for take off is, ‘Am I safer because there is a pilot flying this machine or would I be safer without him?’. This was brought home to me with the media discussion on the crash of the Air France Airbus 330.

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.