For the last five years, I’ve talked about issues I was taught about by Ewan Puckle Hobbs; specifically measurement of major enterprise transformations, or more directly customer profitability. He helped broaden my perspective from simply accounting processes to wider sets of measurement activities.

A core part of this problem is capturing cost of customer activities. Capturing revenue by customer is not typically too hard–customer pay us directly, we simply need to keep track of what they have paid us. (This isn’t a trivial problem given our systems historically loose these amounts quickly by summarizing them out…but that’s a system problem. You can review an earlier episode about the issues here). But costs are not accumulated by customer–we pay all sorts of other people for the services we provide to customers.

I think you’ll find some interesting insights from Ewan on the issues involved in making our organizations more efficient. This is episode 94 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is.