Today’s Conversation with Kip covers my simple view of project management. It can be viewed as the simple lists of; What, or a Scope Diagram Who, an Org Chart When, a Timeline and How Much, a Budget What to do, or a list of issues and risks Here is the overview video, Episode 239 of Conversations with Kip. Project Scope The first page of a … Continue reading Project Management Basics
In Computers Explained: The Meeting Analogy, I gave a basic description of how a computer works. I then added to that in Computers Explained: Big Data Implications how analytical processes impact computers. Today, I expand upon the analogy, covering both the impact of Languages and and Parallel Processing. Programming Tools In my textbook on financial systems, Balancing Act, chapter 17 Programming Tools, I have shared … Continue reading Computers Explained: An Expanded Analogy
Today I release a series of videos about attributes of high quality financial reporting, based upon accounting standards. I also add to these my view of attributes of good accountants; what kinds of characteristics make them capable of producing good financial reports. When in college I was taught by Dr. Leon Woodfield about the Financial Account Standards Board (FASB)’s Statements of Financial Accounting Concepts. One … Continue reading Attributes of Financial Reporting and Financial Reporters
This week’s episode likens our powerful financial systems to the powerful locomotives of the early 20th Century. Powerful Railroad Engines In my semi-biographical textbook “Balancing Act: A Practical Approach to Business Event Based Insights” I described the powerful railroad engine pictured in the video: “When I was living in Sacramento a couple of times during lunch I went over to the California State Railroad Museum … Continue reading Powerful Railroad and Processing Engines
This week’s video makes an outlandish prediction: that in the future companies will not have general ledgers, but instead use the increased compute capacities available from today’s ubiquitous computers to maintain much more granular ledgers, which have the GL perspective embedded in them. With all my experience with enterprise-wide financial reporting systems, I recognize how radical this idea is. And it’s not just the demise … Continue reading Outlandish Prediction: Demise of the G/L
Often discussions with others result in going back to the basic principle I talked about the relationship of the Data Warehouse to the General Ledger. That discussion focused on activity, the thing that creates journal entries. Today’s video builds on that but focuses on the balances. In the operational source systems, we typically make balances of some kind. Can one can accumulate all the balances … Continue reading Do Sub-Ledger Balances Add Up to GL Balances?
On a large project one time a CFO had heard something about troubles in the project developing from using a “fully normalized data model” and asked me what that meant, and why it created problems. I had an idea of how to explain it in a simple way that would make sense to anyone who has worked with multiple tabs of a spreadsheet. Scope of … Continue reading Data Models Matter in Financial Reporting
A couple of years ago a friend was continuing to try to help Risk and Finance effectively coordinate their use of data, and asked me how would I get started on helping them. I noted that the fundamental problem in some instances is the imprecision of our language. We use a single term which actually refers to different things to different people. Solving this problem … Continue reading Metric Engine Step-Up: A Swimming Pool Example
Building on other POC projects, including the short Raspberry Pi experimentation, and the longer Universal Ledger Infrastructure project, I have recently experimented with a personal mainframe system. These systems are not new developments, having been around for more than a decade. I did add one twist I think, making it run on Vagrant as a VM. Hercules z/OS VM Container “Hercules is an open source … Continue reading z/OS on Vagrant: A Personal Mainframe
This week’s episode discusses Financial Auditing, and why it is important to financial reporting; it is the quality assurance process. Any metric engine or report process should have some method to test quality of the outputs. Bayonet the Wounded I worked as a financial auditor for two and a half years in my early career. During that time, as I would go to different businesses … Continue reading Financial Auditing: Quality Control for Metric Engines
