Last week, Quocirca and Oracle launched the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Index—a study that looks at how organisations align their financial and reporting processes to optimise the capabilities of their business.

The research, carried out across 13 countries (aggregated in to 8 geographies) focused on CFO-level respondents in large and very large organisations—and provided some interesting views into what is happening.

At the bare results level, it looks like France and Italy are the two geographies that perform the best, yet further analysis of the results show that this is probably down to these countries being less regulated than their counterparts in some other geographies. Indeed, there was a very strong correlation between how well an organisation scored in the index, and how much it expected the regulatory burden to change in the coming 24 months.

Another strong correlation was between how well organisations scored in the index and how they perceived business intelligence (BI). A surprising number of respondents had no real view as to what BI was, and only a minority saw BI as being a major or critical tool to them—but these did score significantly better in the index.

A strong finding from the research was how little attention the finance function in organisations pays to the various stakeholders in an organisation. Although it may ensure that standard regulatory filings are done in a timely manner, and that shareholders and investors get the information that they are entitled to, very few encouraged input from the internal and external stakeholder community, such as their employees, suppliers, investors and so on. There was also a lack of capability to model future states, meaning that many organisations were relying on "gut feel" and luck when it came to launching new products or services into the market.

The focus is very much one with blinkers on—concentrate on the historical financial performance, and ensure that reporting is being done to time and necessity. There is much room for improvement, with processes needing to be better integrated across the various functions within and outside of the organisation itself.

The research has provided a baseline for the future—Quocirca will be repeating the research on a six-monthly basis. Meanwhile, Oracle has created a dedicated website covering EPM, and Quocirca EPM Index report can be downloaded here.