Dave Kellogg, CEO of Host Analytics, shared his thoughts on enterprise performance management (EPM) during his presentation at the 2014 Chief Financial Officer Leadership Forum in New York on May 13. According to Kellogg, EPM is important for financial organizations because it enables them to focus on planning, consolidation, reporting and analysis.

Kellogg noted EPM provides a financial organization with plenty of data it can use to improve its everyday operations. However, Kellogg said EPM ultimately provides a financial organization with the necessary tools to become a business partner to the CEO: “We understand the ultimate goal of finance is to kind of be a business partner. That if you ask most finance people what their vision is, what they’re trying to accomplish they’ll say it’s table stakes to do transactions. Compliance, that’s table stakes. That’s not a, we have to do it, but it’s not really what it’s all about. The real purpose, what we’re trying to accomplish is something higher and in fact, we’d like to be a business partner to the CEO.”

In addition, Kellogg said the cloud will have a major impact on the finance organization going forward. Because cloud computing enables financial organizations to store and access data remotely, Kellogg said, they can leverage the cloud to streamline their operations: “You can debate what’s going to happen. It’s alive; it’s dead, but I can tell you that the world is moving slowly and steadily to the cloud.”