What Your Clients Want in 2011

A survey of the world’s top CEOs provides clues to the bottom-line needs and expectations of companies and clients.

by Rick Telberg

Finance and accounting professionals may be unprepared for a world of increasing complication in 2011 unless they can learn to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than ever before.

The risks of failure, as we’ve seen from the banking debacle, remain real and ever-present.

At the root of the problem is a world of global inter-connectedness, according to a new IBM survey of 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders, including 290 respondents in the U.S. The common factors are the issues and problems of worldwide integration.

The study provides a roadmap for some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in the coming New Year and rare insight into the concerns, wants and needs for people like your boss or your clients. To be sure, IBM is addressing the effectiveness of physical and digital infrastructures. But any CPA or CFO understands immediately and intuitively the meaning for finance an accounting.

“We occupy a world that is connected on multiple dimensions, and at a deep level — a global system of systems,” the report says. The authors call for stepped-up governance, regulatory and compliance systems, saying a world “subject to systems-level failures” requires “systems-level thinking.”

There are two main issues:

1. Top executives say rapidly escalating “complexity” is their biggest problem, and they expect it to continue, even accelerate, in coming years.

2. They are equally clear that their organizations are not equipped to cope with the problem.

U.S. CEOs are especially worried. Some 86 percent expect high levels of complexity over the next five years, but only 45 percent feel properly prepared.

IBM calls the 41-percentage-point difference a “complexity gap,” adding, it “poses a bigger challenge than any we’ve measured in the eight years we’ve been conducting such research.”

The question for finance and accounting professionals is: What will you do in 2011 to streamline business processes and help create a more agile organization?

Copyright 2010 AICPA.

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