The “front office” is all about winning and sustaining our Customer relationships. The “middle office” is all about product (or service) design, manufacturing, logistics, getting product to the customer. The “back office” is everything else.

In a recent survey we ran in the heat of COVID summer, 75% of Shared Services and GBS leaders agreed that the business emphasis is now shifting, as a result of the crisis, from large scale transformation initiatives to more targeted process change and continuous improvement.

In the clamour of constant challenge to be more data-driven, businesses worldwide are pushing the agenda on a data-driven culture and processes. “Without data, all you have is an opinion” as the legendary engineer W.

The COVID-19 crisis really does highlight to us the importance and value of managing financial risk and controls effectively.

The 2020 State of SOX and Internal Controls Report presented us with some eye-catching insights.

COVID-19 has carelessly trodden all over the year 2020, leaving muddy footprints that don’t seem wash off very easily. One massive ripple it’s caused is history’s biggest surge in technology investment.

Harvey Nash/KPMG’s 2020 CIO and technology leadership survey is just out and has highlighted that the acceleration in digital transformation is here to stay.

“Humans are not actually very good at assessing risk- especially their own risk” states Marie Hellweg-Larsen, a professor of psychology at Dickinson college.

Whether you are assessing everyday risks in management decision making, performing structured risk assessments on key financial risks, or planning a business process, system or technology change, this article by The New York Times points to some of the tricks that our minds play on us.

Transforming a global business on a whole new technology stack is no small feat. This will be the reality for many companies using SAP, with the announcement that traditional SAP ERP will be going out of maintenance in the next few years as they focus on the shift for all customers to S/4HANA.

The advent of noise cancelling headphones was nirvana to music lovers. For the first time we could hear every instrument, every note and nuance, without extraneous distractions, even when we were on the move.

We now have global business processes spanning the globe, supported by multiple instances of numerous systems and services, producing more data than we know what to do with.

Hygiene has been at the top of everybody’s priority list recently, from face masks to hand sanitiser to no handshakes and coughing into our elbows.

But why do we need to “sanitize” our Balance Sheet?

We have all seen the news on the payments firm, WireCard, and the missing 2 billion USD, an arrest warrant and auditors signing off on accounts that they shouldn’t have!

Whilst not all specifics have come to light yet, it has become clear that the auditor was fed false information and basic checks were not done to verify the existence of cash reserves in what appeared to be fraudulent bank statements.