Making the most of your PC

New research shows that more than 75% of finance professionals believe their personal computer is essential for business, but just 45% take full advantage of all the networked collaborative applications available. The rest used their sophisticated PCs merely to compile spreadsheets and other basic financial documents.

The independent report, commissioned by IBM and produced by Bournemouth University, found that the psychology of individuals using the systems still centres rigidly around accounts production rather than a more general IT application.

Large companies that have installed networked client/ server systems are where much of this rigid thinking can be found. Finance departments may replace their dumb terminals with PCs, but, because old habits die hard, they use them in terminal mode to hang from the mainframe as before. The PC parts are effectively only used for spreadsheets and word processing.

So why spend so much money installing new PC technology in finance departments if management accountants are only going to ignore the advantages?

Jyoti Banerjee, managing director of Tate Bramald Consultancy, suggests the problem may be that people are only just getting used to the idea that transaction systems will actually work. ‘It’s the comfort factor.

People think “I’ve been doing it like this so far and it works”, so they carry on.’ British businesspeople, he adds, are wont to fly by the seat of their pants rather than invest time in decision support.

Research by Tate Bramald showed that 75% of accounting personnel do not use their systems for information support, and Banerjee’s view is that the people who use the systems need to address their minds to putting that right.

This view clashes with the experiences of at least one software vendor.

Steve Farr, product marketing manager for Systems Union, suggests that whereas people under-used their systems a great deal a short while ago, this has changed immeasurably. The accounting departments of many Systems Union clients have demanded increasing amounts of integration within their set-ups and the technology has kept pace rather than outstripped what people have requested.

‘If a management accountant is putting budgets together, he has to liaise with all of the line managers. This can take a month out of his year,’ Farr says.

Alastair O’Reilly, managing director of mid-range systems supplier Access Accounting, clearly believes his customers have high expectations of the functions within their accounting suites. ‘A network is only properly utilised (in accounting) when the accounting system running on it allows the users and managers online access to the information they need to do their jobs more efficiently,’ he says.

Farr believes integration with other applications across the company is the only way to make this process possible, particularly because of the way accounting data is presented within accounting suites: ‘People don’t necessarily understand checks and debits. They’ll understand a spreadsheet.’

The essence of IT is that its collaborative elements have taken it beyond working as supercharged typewriter or business calculator. At its best, it enables communication and information sharing that simply was not possible before, although it can still be used simply to do what was already being done, only more swiftly. The newer use of IT is probably best illustrated by the example of a travelling salesman for a major corporate.

Believing he has a hot prospect for a sale, he has to travel from London to Newcastle to close the deal. This is not a problem, and before long the salesperson walks through the client’s door – only to be told they cannot buy because the supplier has stopped the customer’s credit.

Many businesses have suffered as a result of this sort of non-communication.

Not only does the corporate lose the sale, but it has wasted a day’s wages and travelling expenses.

If the salesperson had used the collaborative capacity of a PC network to its fullest advantage, it would have been possible to check the prospect’s status with the business in real time for financial stability, using the vendor’s own records. This could have been done remotely or at the office.

But the time and expense would have been saved. This is a really elementary example.

Converting raw data into information so that it can be used for decision support is more complex, but the rewards are as great.

Increasingly, it is no longer a technology issue, but one about the culture of a company and its way of working. IT has now reached the stage at which people must deliberately alter the way they function in order to take the fullest advantage of information sharing – otherwise they might as well have stuck with 286-based PCs instead of Pentium, and run DOS instead of Windows NT.

And yet all of this ignores one fundamental question: if people are not using the technology to its fullest advantage, does that necessarily mean the people are getting it wrong?

Independent analyst Dennis Keeling says one issue keeping people away from a fully collaborative network environment is the current view from Microsoft, which advises companies not to upgrade to Windows 95 but wait until Windows NT Server emerges because it is more stable. IBM, meanwhile, has just released its network PC. ‘They see that as the replacement for the terminal, not the PC, which is more costly to maintain,’ says Keeling.

So perhaps the accountants’ rejection of the PC system has been due to unfamiliarity, and it is down to the computer industry to sort out.

This is a valid point, but it neglects badly the other consideration – that whereas 45% of financial personnel are under-using their PC systems according to Bournemouth University’s figures, the figure is a staggering 60% for sales personnel. The figures point to accountants either as conservative types who don’t much like changing the way they work, or people who have not been made aware of their products’ benefits.

This, given that accountants are exactly the sort of people who know how much investment has been put into making the systems pay for them, is more than a little ironic.

Guy Clapperton is a freelance journalist.