IAFEI Quarterly - Special Issue

21 Materials contained in this publication may be freely quoted or reprinted, provided credit is given to the source : International Observatory of Management Control - DFCG – Decision Performance Conseil www.conseil-dpc.com The simplification of the budget process is cited by 48% of the companies in the American region vs. 36% in the European region. Simplification is cited twice as often as the shortening of the budget production time. The needs for IT systems improvement We observe a stability in the needs of improvement of the functionalities of Management IT systems. The top 3 needs (automat- ed reports, integration of tools and simulations) have not evolved much over the last three years albeit the need for simulations has increased between 2016 and 2017. Automated reports are by far the first requirement and need. They have been standing out from other needs for three consecutive years. These automated reports requirements are found in the recent evolution of business intelligence ("BI") tools which offe automated reporting on phone or tablet. It is surprising to note that the insertion of comments is in the last position in the list of re- quests. In 2017, 81% of respondents want to improve their reporting tools; only 21% express the desire to amend the insertion of comments in the tools. It seems that the added value of report- ing lies more in the analysis of data than in the production of numbers. To explain this lack of interest, it is fairly possible that respondents appear to have difficulties integrating unformatted data into highly structured BI tools. For the majority of the respondents, there are many areas for improvement. In the question- naire 7 choices were proposed. On average, they selected 3.5 areas of improvement. The num- ber of companies that do not wish to improve remains marginal: between 2% and 4% from 2015 to 2017.