Rear View Mirror Driving

The latest Hackett Book of Numbers confirms it

"Despite a market environment where missed earnings projections can lead to sharp stock declines, CFO firings, or worse, most companies fail to accurately forecast earnings and sales" 2 out 3 companies miss the next quarter's forecast by between 6 and 30%." That's just the next quarter!!

In the meantime, fellow EI Charlie Bess and I are having a discussion around the massive amounts of data being generated by sensors, RFID tags and GPS devices in what I called the LARTE - Location Aware Real Time Enterprise. And the need for much more sophisticated data mining and pattern recognition technology.

Back in the CFO world, ERP vendors continue pitching their customers Hyperion and Business Objects - tools that have been around for eons. Is it not time to look at different predictive analytical tools, and may be even prediction markets leveraging the wisdom of crowds? Surely they would do as good a job with the next quarter's forecast?