NEUBRAINER, the official blog of Neubrain

If you have ever worked in a governmental organization, you probably experienced the mental gymnastics of the dreaded “what-if” drills.  The annual bureaucratic budget review and approval processes, changing priorities based on political agendas, and emerging agency requirements make these drills a frequent occurrence at all levels of government.  Governmental organizations are often tasked to  “develop options”, “look for efficiencies”, or other code words to deal with real or perceived budget cuts.  These units are scrambling to play defense – to defend (or re-defend) planned resourcing levels. A reason why budgeting is so difficult is that many government organizations have difficulty tying resource allocation to objective criteria that clearly enables decision-makers to make conscious trade-offs, as well as providing transparency throughout the organization. 

Large and complex organizations maintain a strategic focus on processes and systems to manage their workforce. Despite being one of the largest expenditure items, workforce expenditures are typically neglected and left to finance to manage with a complex set of spreadsheets. Oftentimes there is not enough collaboration between HR and finance groups, leaving a huge disconnect between people and dollars. Greater control and a true picture of payroll dollars are more important than ever with organizational growth, changing priorities, budgetary constraints, and other factors that influence the workforce.  

While most modern budgeting software solutions can eliminate the basic spreadsheet challenges associated with data capture and simple aggregation, they typically do not take the next step: enabling the organization to use its data to improve budget decisions and the linkages between budgets and outcomes.

Many government agencies and private corporations are nearing the end of the 7-10 year average lifespan of most budgeting and performance management software systems, causing more and more CFOs to explore new budgeting and performance management technologies. In fact, according to the “2013 Gartner Financial Executives International (FEI) CFO Technology Study,” nearly 60% of CFOs indicated that investing in analytics and decision-making was their top priority, as it should be. 

In the past decade, budgeting and financial planning technologies have transformed from error-prone manual data entry tools to an array of advanced analytical, integrated, and sophisticated real-time budget management software solutions, improvements that are only making the software selection even more difficult. Recent independent research revealed the top three software acquisition impairment factors:

• Lack of user input
• Incomplete requirements and specifications
• Changing requirements and specifications

To overcome software acquisition impairment, it is imperative to put time, effort and thought into your software selection process and establish quality requirements. 

Click on the infographic and discover just how important detailed, thought-through QUALITY requirements are to your budgeting software selection process or read the complete list here.