Balancing Act: A Practical Approach to Business Event Based Insights

Balancing Act is the story of Kip Twitchell’s journey from eager student to accomplished expert in reporting and analytics, focused on Business Event Based Insights. Worldwide financial crises continue to demonstrate all too clearly that the world's largest reporting systems do not provide adequate transparency. Twitchell argues that in many respects it’s no wonder: Our financial systems—the original and continued bedrock of all automated reporting systems—are simple automations of manual procedures codified centuries ago. Business events are the raw materials for all reporting processes. Yet these inputs often get lost in the automation shuffle, since the underlying manual procedures never had bandwidth to deal with them. Tracing the underlying principles of both accountancy and information systems, from his days in college through his experience as a CPA, systems developer, system architect and thought leader, Twitchell explains that focusing on inputs to reporting systems — the business events — has the potential to provide much greater flexibility, scalability and, most crucially, transparency. Doing so, however, requires scaling analytical processes, using billions of rows of data in short periods of time to produce controlled, consistent, and reconciled outputs. The book presents real world examples of such systems and the benefits achieved by very large organizations using them; systems based upon the IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting, or SAFR. The cold, hard facts of computers, data, and accounting are explained in an engaging narrative of a personal discovery guided by mentors and assisted by a tight-knit, single-minded team over two decades. The result is an enlightening perspective on the future of analytics, reporting and information systems.