Ventana Research and Teradata Finance and Performance Management have released a new research white paper, "Financial Performance Management for the 21st Century." Ventana undertook this benchmarking research study to determine how CFOs are addressing the evolving demands on the finance organization in a way that improves corporate performance. Ventana conducted the study via a web-based interface and promoted it to finance managers and IT professionals supporting Finance through its media partners, membership community and the Teradata user community. The study's results reveal that a majority of companies today are struggling to leverage IT in a way that sustainably improves their financial performance. Most crucially, Finance generally finds IT to be a barrier to attempts to better align corporate strategy with execution. Specific results bearing this out include:

• Only 14% of companies actually manage to their strategy, even if they have one that is well-defined.
• Only 25% of respondents understand how their department's or business unit's strategic objectives relate to objectives for other departments or business units.

Ventana's research results reveal a number of IT complexity issues that explain why so few finance organizations have helped their companies successfully link strategy and execution. Read the "Financial Performance Management for the 21st Century" white paper now, to see Ventana's recommendations for CFO organizations, and the crucial role that the enterprise data warehouse plays in providing critical financial performance management capabilities.