Business Intelligence: A Managed Service for YOUR IT Business

What if a construction company decided to repeatedly add new floors to a building without reviewing the strength of the current structure? The potential for a major catastrophe (collapse) will escalate exponentially with each new block or board added to the infrastructure. That’s why they test and evaluate the current situation (building) before designing the next steps. The same philosophy should be applied to a business’ financial situation; get a full evaluation of the organization’s fiscal metrics before making significant changes.

The typical IT services business gets more complicated each year, between technology advances, revenue and customer expansion, and a myriad of financial adjustments. Each time a solution provider faces a critical financial business decision, the need for on demand business intelligence continues to grow significantly. By employing industry benchmarks and business analytics, companies are able to identify where improvements can be made to their financials quickly and frequently. Potential issues can be identified before it’s too late to make the changes needed to ensure your company’s financial health, including survival in the most critical cases. While these applications are valuable to any business, the expense has kept some companies from employing the tools.

 With that in mind, CompTIA formed a partnership with CoreConnex to develop a CompTIA Edition of the Corelytics ™ Financial Dashboard, and is providing it FREE of charge to all association members! This console offers users a comprehensive overview of current and projected business performance, and allows a company to assess its situation prior to making critical decisions. In order to ensure the data is representative of the IT services industry, Service Leadership (lead by business financial expert Paul Dippel) has agreed to integrate its performance benchmarks into this dashboard as well.

This combination of industry benchmarks, business analytics, and the financial dashboard provides CompTIA members with a valuable tool to review their business metrics and make adjustments to improve their organization. Many providers will find this “light” version of the Corelytics Financial Dashboard to be extremely beneficial, with the option to upgrade to a more comprehensive subscription version as needed. This release is just the first step to greater business intelligence availability, as CompTIA and CoreConnex intend to create extensions that will provide guidance and tips to help service providers make improvements to their financial metrics and business opportunities.

This tool isn’t a one-size-fits-all; it’s configurable to benchmark your business to like organizations. You import information directly from your accounting system into the Corelytics Financial Dashboard, allowing you to run a multitude of trend lines, forecasts, and business performance analytics. The system uses your company’s profile data to select a set of benchmarks that are derived from companies with similar characteristics. That means the data you compare isn’t diluted by a variety of dissimilar companies.