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Is it time to jump on the “cloud computing” bandwagon with your TM1 application? It depends. A month ago we talked about IBM’s new TM1 on Cloud offering, in which we explained what it is TODAY. In this blog post we will try to give you some guidance on how to make decisions around it.

It turns out that TM1’s nature makes this a surprisingly interesting topic (by the end I hope this comment will be clear)!

The “C” in CEO, is short for “Chief”.  The Merriam Webster dictionary defines Chief to mean: Highest in rank or authority; most important; the person who is the leader of a group of people, of an organization, etc.  Today we are accustomed to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and in some organizations other chiefs like the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) and the Chief Risk Officer (CRO).

Chiefs have been around since man first graced the earth.  However, chiefs in business, certainly ones with the word “chief” in their job title, are quite a recent thing.  A 1999 University of Michigan study written by David W. Allison and Blyden B. Potts found that in 1955 only one of the 200 largest industrial corporations in the United States used the title Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to denote its chief executive.  By 1975 all but one of these firms had a CEO.  A similar study from the University of Princeton written by Dirk M. Zorn found through an examination of 400 of the largest corporations, none of them had a Chief Financial Officer in 1964 but more than 80% did by the year 2000.  The main catalytic event was an ambiguous change in accounting rules in 1979 issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB 33) in response to the corporate funding crisis of the 1970's.  As the need for financial controls became greater, companies needed to establish an authority at the top of their organizations that would be fully responsible for the compliance of control related regulations.

Back in 2012, an article was written in Business Week prompting business schools to adapt business analytics as a standalone concentration within their curriculums. At the time, there were a few universities that offered full-fledged degree programs such as DePaul, Fordham, and North Carolina State. On the undergrad level, there were only three programs that came from Augusta State University, St. Joseph’s University, and Stuttgart Media University.

Fast forward to today, and we’ve seen some progress. According to an article in the Huffington Post, the role of “business analyst” became one of the fastest growing jobs in 2013. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed this phenomenon, predicting a 22% increase in jobs by 2020.

However, the demand for BA work still doesn’t match up with the manpower that’s presently available. McKinsey & Company revealed that by 2018, we could see a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 professionals with deep analytical skills.

Did you ever lose your train of thought because you couldn’t stop thinking about an inevitable software implementation project? Don’t sweat it. The thought of a large-scale implementation puts even the most seasoned IT people on the edge of their seats. The immediate questions and comments that get tossed back and forth between both sides (client and vendor) sound something like this:

Are You Ready to Love TM1 on Cloud?

As a technology professional, I think I love the Cloud, or perhaps I just love the idea of it. There are a ton of opinions and articles out on the web extolling its virtues. For example, who would not want 1.7 times greater ROI with the Cloud vs. an on-premise implementation?

If you're recapping all of the noteworthy IT events and phenomena in 2013, you can certainly start with Big Data. Amidst cloud computing and mobile innovations, "Big Data" was a big deal to a lot of decision-makers. And they bought in. According to Gartner, Big Data drove upwards of $34 million of IT spending.