Ep. 148: Gregory Kogan - Self-service Analytics

Contact Gregory Kogan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-kogan-083bb07/


Self-Service Data Analytics and Governance for
Managers (book):
https://www.amazon.com/Self-Service-Data-Analytics-Governance-Managers/dp/1119773296


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
 Welcome back to episode 148 of Count Me In, IMA's podcast
about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This
is your host Adam Larson, and I'm pleased to kick off today's
episode by introducing you to Gregory Kogan. Gregory is professor
of practice and accounting at Long Island University, focusing on
teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in accounting and
finance. He is also currently pursuing his doctorate in business
administration at the university of Scranton with the research
focus of data analytics and accounting. So in our upcoming
episode, you will hear Greg discuss self-service analytics. Keep
listening as we head over to the conversation now.
 
 Mitch: (00:49)
 In the field of finance and accounting, there's been a lot
of talk about data and analytics. And, I know in your space you
have a lot of experience. I'm just curious from your perspective,
what is really driving the accelerated pace of analytics and the
overall adoption at these larger enterprises?
 
 Greg: (01:09)
 Yeah, so I think the biggest thing, and if we're talking
about the finance function, it's really the, realization of ROI
(return on investment), where companies can use these new
techniques, analytics, automation to accelerate their processing,
right? So in finance accounting, for years, we've been doing
things manually and repetitively. And now with these new tools
and these technologies, a lot of companies are adopting these
tools to accelerate processing, reduced processing time, reduce
hours, accelerate processes, and there are benefits like it's
more accurate, there's more control, better internal control. And
those are really big benefits on top of the financial benefits.
So there's sort of a convergence, I think that, companies are
just taking advantage of this, the, to have more smooth and
streamlined processing. That's more efficient.
 
 Mitch: (02:08)
 Now I know something that you focus on or, you know, you'd
like to share a little bit more here are these, self service
tools, right. And, you know, just for our listeners, what are
some of the defining characteristics of this subset and how does
it work into analytics? And, you know, when it comes to again,
advancing some of these opportunities, I guess you could say, why
do these tools lead to more of a decentralized pattern for your
reference?
 
 Greg: (02:36)
 Right? So the tools, yeah. So the tools we're talking
about, you know, and coming out, you know, very much out of the
what's happening in public accounting and what's happening in the
finance function in terms of, financial and managerial
accounting. We're really talking about Tableau and Alteryx, which
are off the shelf tools. And even in higher education, we have a
lot of these now in the classroom. So this is a still pretty,
fairly new, but very much highly used. And we call themselves
service tools because, it's not something you develop, what you
end up developing is a specific process within that tool. So for
example, an Alteryx, you can create a little process that say
does a reconciliation or a certain reporting. And it's something
that used to live in Excel. That's really now living in this tool
and we call it self service. It's in that bucket of you can
really do it yourself, much. Like you do Excel yourself. You
could really, as a finance professional, since it's low code or
really no code you pick up the tool you put in your data, which
you really, you already have access to. That's really something
you work with on a day to day, and you can set up these, we call
them analytics, assisted automations for Alteryx and in Tableau
it's really dashboards and visualizations. So it depends what
part of it you're working with. But yeah.
 
 Mitch: (04:04)
 That's very helpful. And I know, you know, in our space
management accounts, specifically, a lot of that, you know,
internal focused and we're really into, you know, the
storytelling behind it and the tools that you referenced
literally enable, you know, our, our listeners, our finance and
accounting professionals to present this data in a way that's
easily easy to understand for everybody, right. I think that's
really the goal, but, you know, taking it even a step further
here, try to, you know, set the stage for us a little bit. What
are some of the primary motivations? And, you know, there is some
kind of investment or, you know, even if it's just a learning
curve in order to adopt these tools, what are the end goals, but
what can our listeners expect if they're able to implement these
strategies?
 
 Greg: (04:48)
 Right. So what you can, what are the, some of the benefits,
essentially, after some investment, what you can end up doing is
something that you do on a recurring basis, manually in Excel,
right? And, and we had this also, as a case study in the book
that we're kind of referencing here, the self-service data
analytics and governance for managers, but this is something that
I've been doing as a case study with students and in the MBA. And
what happens is we basically have like five years of data of
balance sheet and income statement data. And, and we do this in
Excel where we compute all the financial ratios, profit margin,
asset turnover, return, and equity. And we do like the DuPont
model, basically for all the companies in the S&P 500. So for
example, what we did as a case study in the book, we put it in
the Alteryx and then we set it up as like little steps, rather
than Excel. It's sort of all in one big place and you could still
see everything. And we do pivot tables and graphs. It's still a
very, very good, but once we set it up in Alteryx, we're able to
filter the data by industry. So all of a sudden we started
looking just at information technology. We started looking at
graphs for each company of all the ratios, and then we started
looking at specific companies a little bit further down the line
to see, oh, wait, we just keep looking for the best one. What is
the best industry? What is the best company? And then for that
company, we have four dashboards for each of the ratios over five
years. And after we set that up, we thought, wow, if this was
like, say this was in management accounting, and I was doing my
own internal reports, it could still be profit margin by region
or geography. I could really sit with that and just flip my
filter from Europe to north America and see my ratios, you know,
and then we were thinking about it for me to do it in Excel every
month. And it's something I used to do as an accountant. I just
imagine it's a lot of work, get the new data uploaded, reconcile
it. And that's something that takes us a couple of dates and just
the flip, the switch. And Alteryx where you just upload the new
data. And it does it for you. That's what we sort of started
imagining. And of course we have seen the benefits. We've talked
to people who've seen the benefits, but just to feel it yourself,
like that amount of work going down from three days to like 30
minutes is exciting. And I don't know, I don't think you lose
anything in the process. In fact, it is still stable. It is
controllable and it's more flexible because the, all the charts
are, you still see them, you know, and you just, you do it
yourself. It's not something you have to call an IT person too.
So I think it can e...