The CGMA Competency Framework defines four knowledge areas that finance professionals need to drive their organisations’ success. The framework, released Thursday, also offers employers and management accountants a guide for the assessment of the skills needed for current and future roles.

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As part of any good Performance Management System for a company there should be included Personal Development Plans for the employees. From a HR perspective you can only develop a company through its employees. Employees who stop developing will eventually become a burden to the company. Continue reading →

For you to be a successful manager you have to feel in control at all times. If you are stressed out and all over the place, your staff, bosses and colleagues will pick up on this very quickly and will conspire to add to the pressure you are already feeling. This will cause a downward spiral that is hard to break.

The way to avoid this in the first place is to have a clear picture of what has to be done and an even clearer picture of who has to do what. For this to happen you have to block of a chunk of time to formulate the picture in the first place. This thinking time and planning time is probably the most important thing any manager can do, so you have to guard your diary to make sure sufficient time is set aside for this vital function.

Work to your own body clock here, some people are most creative first thing in the morning others late in the evening, whatever time you are at your best, pick an appropriate location for your session. Only use your own desk if you are happy you will not be disturbed. Why not book a meeting room for a set period of time and close the door behind you and get to work. From everyone else’s perspective you are at an important meeting, this is true, although some might be surprised to discover the attendance at the meeting is only one!

If you are working in an open plan office you can use a couple of simple systems to give you some uninterrupted working time. The first is where you agree with a colleague that if you can divert your phone to them for an hour, they can divert their phone to you for an hour. This means the phone will be answered and you will get to concentrate on the job in hand. You can also use a system with red stickers when applied to the wall of the partition indicates that the door is closed and you are not to be disturbed. Some people think that because you are in an open plan office you are available at all times, this system, as long as it is not over used will give you the time you need for the important tasks.

You are probably getting the picture at this stage that management is a function that is carried out on a one to one level. Part of everyday should be devoted to talking to your staff individually, to explain exactly what has to be done, the standards that have to be achieved and the desired outcome.

I am a huge fan of written lists; you should maintain a list of what has to be done at any given time. I recommend updating your list before you leave the office in the evening to make sure nothing has been missed. This also has the added bonus of enabling you to leave the work behind you in the office rather than constantly carrying it around with you in your head – particularly when you get home in the evening.

Every time you make a list of what has to be done there are a number of key questions:

When does this task have to be completed by?

Who is the best person to complete this task?

What can be done to either automate or eliminate this task altogether?

With this level of thinking performance will improve.

The order that tasks are completed is up to you, again some simple rules help here. The question you must ask as you are going through the list is “What is the most important thing I can do right now? Not what is the easiest? Or what will get others off my back? Unless those “others” includes your boss, the tasks your boss has asked you to do should always be at the very top of your priority list. There are many reasons for this statement and we discuss this later. In the meantime get in control, write your list, analyse what you have to do and why. Then spend your time working on the most important things and you will see a real difference on a daily basis. Continue reading →

Tech giant Google has been given the green light to build its second Irish data centre.

Responding to the launch by Minister Brian Hayes, TD of “Circular 10/14: Initiatives to assist SMEs in Public Procurement, the Director of the Small Firms Association, Patricia Callan, has stated that “this new guidance document, whilst welcome simply does not go far enough to ensure SMEs get their fair share of government contracts”. Continue reading →

Ethicon Biosurgery Ireland has announced plans to create 270 jobs in Co Limerick over the next five years.

There will also be 150 temporary construction jobs as part of the €80 million investment by the company in a manufacturing facility at the National Technology Park in Plassey. Continue reading →

It is clear from the outcome of the survey that succession planning should be viewed as a process of business evolution from generation to generation. It is much more than just the retirement of an owner although this may be a trigger for the succession planning to commence. In reality, the process of preserving the business beyond the current ownership should be considered and planned for long before the actual retirement of the owner. Continue reading →

It has been recently announced that Switzerland has lost one of its most lucrative multinationals, Yahoo! Yahoo!’s European Head Office has been based in the Alpine nation since 2008 and has decided to move operations to Ireland. Although they claim it has nothing to do with the new changes in the Swiss taxation rules it is hard to believe that this statement is particularly accurate.  Continue reading →

A NEW national Diaspora centre would present a “major opportunity” for new jobs in Limerick, says local TD Kieran O’Donnell.

The government has launched a call for expressions of interest in building such a centre , which will include a facility for people to trace their roots, and a conference centre. Continue reading →

US Bureau of Economic Analysis data on effective tax rates in Ireland – An analysis.

Summary

A recent IIIS paper  concluded that subsidiaries of US multinationals operating in Ireland have an effective tax rate of 2.2%. This is based on calculations derived from US Bureau of Economic Analysis (“BEA”) data. The BEA data is fatally flawed as a source for calculating an effective tax rate for US owned companies operating in Ireland. Critically it conflates the concepts of place of incorporation and proper locus of income for corporation tax purposes. Irish Revenue statistical reports confirm that the denominator in the effective tax rate calculation of 2.2% in the IIIS Paper is overstated by several hundred percent. Continue reading →

A relief from capital acquisitions tax for all gifts and inheritances taken on or after 11 April, 1994 of relevant business property was introduced in the Finance Act, 1994. The relief only applies to mainstream gift and inheritance tax. It does not apply to discretionary trust tax. Subsequent Finance Acts have amended the original provisions. Continue reading →

The Acting Director of the Small Firms Association (SFA), Avine McNally has said that late payments in Ireland are compounding a difficult financial environment for many small firms.  With the average payment in Ireland taking 62 days. Continue reading →

Irish Companies are suffering data breaches in record numbers, according to a new survey from The Irish Computer Society (ICS). The survey, conducted among IT administrators in 256 Irish-based companies, revealed that more than half of firms have experienced a data breach in the last 12 months, with 22% suffering multiple breaches.

Over half (51%) of respondents reported the incidence of data breaches in the past year. This is sharply up on the previous 12 months, where just 43% reported a breach.  Furthermore one in three Irish companies’ staff were said not sufficiently aware of data protection issues, with some 40% of staff receiving ‘insufficient’ or ‘no’ data protection training.

The EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, recently said it was important for EU citizens – particularly teenagers – to be in control of their online identities.  Although several EU countries have found Google’s privacy policy breaks data protection laws, the fines handed out are no deterrent, Commissioner Viviane Reding said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

In France Google was fined €150,000 by data protection authorities, while in Spain the search giant was fined €900,000. Those fines, the maximum allowed, were just “pocket money” to Google, Reding said.

Discussing proposed EU legislation (which when passed will come into immediate effect in Ireland), and its effect on organisations such as Google, she said…

“My proposals will help build trust in online services because people will be better informed about their rights and more in control of their information.”
“Taking Google’s 2012 performance figures, the fine in France represents just 0.0003% of its global turnover,” she said adding that it was hardly a surprise that even two years after the case emerged Google has still not changed its privacy policy.
“Europeans need to get serious,” she said. “If a company has broken the rules and failed to mend its ways, this should have serious consequences.”

Under new data protection laws proposed by Reding, sanctions could be up to two percent of global annual turnover. In the Google case, that would have meant a fine of €731 million.

The commission says that key changes to the 1995 data protection rules include:

• People will have easier access to their own data, and will find it easier to transfer it from one service provider to another.
• Users will have the right to demand that data about them be deleted if there are no “legitimate grounds” for it to be kept.
• Organisations must notify the authorities about data breaches as early as possible, “if feasible within 24 hours”.
• In cases where consent is required organisations must explicitly ask for permission to process data, rather than assume it.
• Companies with 250 or more employees will have to appoint a data protection officer.

She added that companies responsible for more serious violations could be fined up to 2% of their turnover. The sum is capped at 1m euros for other bodies.

The challenge of managing high volumes of documentation in an organisation is no easy task, and one inflamed by the huge volumes of data that today’s organisations have to manage, where the loss of even one document can have catastrophic consequences. Achieving a working environment where information is captured, stored and shared securely must be a top priority.

Importantly, a confidentiality breach may not always be overt. There are also ‘quieter’ daily risks within a business. For example, sensitive commercial information such as business plans, strategies and financial information may find its way into the hands of competitors, without a business ever being aware.

It is not just the threat of security breaches that keeps European leaders awake at night: 36 per cent of business leaders said errors meant they failed to meet compliance requirements, leaving them vulnerable to heavy financial penalties at a time when the world is experiencing unprecedented financial turbulence. Worse, 30 per cent claimed these errors caused them to lose key employees and a further 25 per cent said it cost them major customers, demonstrating the impact that poor document processes have on organisations and so economies.

Analysts IDC believe that the amount of information that needs to be secured is now growing faster than our ability to secure it. Gartner predict that by 2015, 80% of a projected 650% growth in enterprise data will be unstructured and IDC believe that unstructured data will account for 90% of all data created in the next decade. Unstructured information does not conform to neat data models and spans all forms of content from text to multimedia, making it difficult to manage with traditional business systems and security solutions.
For organisations already saturated with data, the flood of unstructured data arising from the Big Data phenomenon threatens to overwhelm traditional Data Loss Prevention and Archiving solutions and strategies – raising costs and adding risk. IDC’s view is that Big Data will only deliver big value to businesses through the addition of metadata that will tell you which data is needed, when and for what purpose.

Key Challenges

Securing buy-in from senior management

It’s a common IT department complaint that, through lack of investment in Data Protection initiatives, senior management runs the risk of incurring the costs of a potential data breach as opposed to implementing what they view as costly data protection solutions. So how can IT set about convincing the CTO that this is a false economy and that investing strategically in data protection can be the better long-term option? The best way is to show them the potential cost of not doing anything. The most recent reports indicate that the cost (direct and indirect) per data record lost is about €180. Add to that the potential fine of up to €1M and the argument can be compelling.

The Need to classify data held within the organisation

Data classification dates back to the first time someone scrawled “top secret” at the top of a document, and it’s the requisite for all your loss-prevention efforts. If your organization hasn’t identified what information to guard most closely, then how can any technology prevent that information from falling into the wrong hands? The key is to develop a system that has a chance of working.
Information classification is one method of helping users and IT services to understand the context for a piece of information.  Often called categorisation or cataloguing, information classification adds to the content of digital data. This extra information could be the name of the business unit responsible for the document, or the retention period required by policy for this type of email message. In the IT world, information classification data added to documents and email messages is called metadata (“data about data” or “information about information”).

Metadata is used in many diverse situations, from the memo line on cheques to ISBN numbers for books. In everyday conversations, words like “project plan” and “financial data” are used to describe the information that people need to do the business of an organisation. Although there are some terms that are common to many businesses, each organisation has its own way of describing the information that it depends on. In some larger organisations there are even terms that are appropriate for only part of the business. These words and phrases can be thought of as the taxonomy for the information classification.

Using the Right Technologies

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of information security tools that is intended to stop users from sending sensitive or critical information outside of the corporate network. Adoption of DLP, variously called data leak prevention, information loss prevention or extrusion prevention is being driven by significant insider threats and by more rigorous state privacy laws, many of which have stringent data protection or access components.

Discover — Find confidential data wherever it is stored, create an inventory of sensitive data, and automatically manage data cleanup.
Monitor — Understand how confidential data is being used whether the user is on or off the corporate network, and gain enterprise visibility.
Protect — Automatically enforce security policies to proactively secure data and prevent confidential data from leaving an organization.
Manage — Define universal policies across the enterprise, remediate and report on incidents, and detect content accurately within one unified platform.

Given that the majority of data leaks are accidental and not malicious, engaging the user in the accurate classification of documents is an appropriate strategy.  Classification engages users in structuring data at its source, enhancing their awareness of information security at the same time as applying the critical metadata. To get users to adopt classification, the challenge is to make it part of the day-to-day routine of every different user community within a business.  This can be accomplished by integrating easy-to-use tools into the office productivity software (MS Office and email) and making classification a mandatory requirement for all new and modified documents.
By adding information classification metadata to documents and email messages, and configuring DLP policy to understand the value of this metadata, an IT organisation can significantly increase the effectiveness of a DLP implementation. Metadata contained in an email message indicating the sensitivity of the content can be recognised by a DLP solution and the correct policy applied based on the user’s intention without guesses based on DLP software algorithms.

One advantage to using an information classification strategy for an organisation’s information assets that might not be obvious is reduced cost during e-discovery procedures. As long as an organisation can credibly state that information has been categorised, the magnitude of an e-discovery process can be limited to the information that is relevant to the issues at hand. Reducing the number of documents and email messages involved directly reduces the cost of an e-discovery exercise.

Training and Awareness for Staff

User awareness is a key to keeping sensitive data safe from online predators. DLP is a process first. The technology is simply an enabler for the automation of the process. The process needs to include education and awareness training and cover human resources, records management and compliance. The objective is to continuously train data owners and data custodians (the employees) on the company policies to reduce instances of non-compliance. Continue reading →

The Start Your Own Business scheme provides for relief from Income Tax for long term unemployed individuals who start a new business. The scheme will provide an exemption from Income Tax up to a maximum of €40,000 per annum for a period of two years to individuals who set up a qualifying business; having been unemployed for a period of at least 12 months prior to starting the business. It runs from 25 October 2013 to 31 December 2016. Continue reading →