In his latest blog, Steve Player, makes a great analogy between data and food crops as a lead in to discussing the challenges of harvesting Big Data to improve decision-making and ultimately drive profitability.

Like he says, Big Data has been with us forever, it’s just that now with developments such as SAP’s HANA – the in-memory processing appliance  – have made it possible to manipulate previously inaccessible silos of heterogeneous data and rapidly gain insight and understanding.

Being a (beyond) budgeting guru, Steve hones in on the uses of in-memory for planning, but intelligently steers clear of suggesting that Finance themselves should use such capabilities to plan and budget at even greater levels of detail, which would surely be a move in the wrong direction.

He points out that Finance can benefit from faster and better data coming up from their lines of business, rapid cash flow forecasting, instantaneous simulations and quicker access to detailed ledger and profitability data.

But please let’s not use the capability of SAP HANA to expand the chart of accounts. Or does anyone have a different perspective?