Does your organization take advantage of data analytics? According to the latest study from the MIT Sloan Management School and IBM’s Institute for Business Value, top-performing companies are three times more likely to be leading users of data analytics.

The study, based on a sample of nearly 3,000 executives and business analysts from 108 countries and 30 industries, found a clear connection between users of analytics technology and the ability to achieve competitive differentiation and performance. For example, top performers are five times more likely to apply analytics rather than intuition across the widest possible range of decisions. In finance and budgeting, top performers were nearly four times more likely than others to apply analytics. So much for making decisions based on what your gut says.

The study hits at a time when organizations are being inundated with data, often at a rate faster than their people and even their systems can effectively capture, assess, and act. And it is not just the volume of data but the speed at which it changes and variety of the information that makes analytics so difficult.

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One reason the unemployment rate is refusing to budge can be found right in the finance, HR, IT, and procurement departments of many companies. Between 2008 and 2010, European and North American companies with revenues of $1 billion or more shed 1.4 million jobs across these functions, according to a recent analysis by The Hackett Group. What’s more, another one million jobs in these departments are expected to disappear by 2014. By then, the total number of these positions will have been slashed nearly in half from 2000 levels. more

The shift to electronic vehicles continues, while mobile payment technologies attract interest.

Two recent surveys, the 2010 AFP Electronic Payments survey from AFP and the World Payments Report 2010 from a trio of organizations — CapGemini, RBS, and Efma (the European financial marketing association) — show a payments landscape that continues to grow, particularly in emerging markets, and shift from paper to electronic and mobile payment devices.

As its name indicates, The World Payments Report 2010 looks at retail and business payments globally. Around the world, noncash payments, such as those made with credit and debit cards, grew by 9 percent in 2008, the global downturn notwithstanding; this growth is expected to have continued into 2009. In fact, the U.K.’s Payments Council National Plan is set to phase out check usage in Great Britain by 2018. Countries showing the greatest growth in noncash payments were China, up 29 percent; South Africa at 25 percent; and Russia, up an eye-popping 66 percent. At the same time, the developed economies in North America, Europe, and Asia continue to account for more than three-quarters of the overall noncash payments market. more

Planning initiatives or (to use a more formal word) projects can be challenging. Most business is process- rather than project-oriented.

Processes are routine and have well-defined inputs. Making a widget requires these materials and so many labor hours. A sales call involves the following steps and these pieces of collateral. You execute the monthly close in a set pattern.

Projects or initiatives, on the other hand, are irregular in both time sequence and resources used. Projects are planned as discrete efforts while processes are recurring and routine and so do not require definition before they are started.

Laying out a project/initiative plan and the budget that goes with it may not be difficult. However, adapting the plan to changing circumstances, calculating the financial impact of those changes, and assessing performance to the plan can be time-consuming and ineffective if you don’t use the right software.

If initiatives or projects have a visible impact on your bottom line, you should look into improving the way you plan and review them. more