Control is the new black

I was chairing a panel discussion with a couple of FDs this monring at the Loss Prevention 06 event in Kensington. (Stay awake at the back!) The subject was getting "LP" noticed at board level, and I was joined by Annie Guerard of Diesel and Peter Hartley, formerly FD of Blacks Leisure, Next and Texas Homecare. But it was something Annie said that really caught my attention.

She was stressing the importance of control in the modern business. Now that the systems have given us visibility within the organisation and the pace of change has accelerated (in a retail context, she pointed out, that also means the speed with which shoplifters, crooked staff and fraudsters evlove their tactics or exploit a weakness in huge numbers before you discover it), having a great controller in place to ensure that things are just as they seem is critical. In bigger organisations, of course, that might become the duty of an internal auditor or even (again, in retail) a dedicated loss prevention/security director. But for most businesses, the controller needs to be on the money all the time if the company isn't going to suffer a death by a thousand cuts. Her point was that everyone else needs to appreciate the importance of the FC role to their own function and pay it due respect.

And, actually, retailers are great places to see how the control role allows you to cross boundaries. It's no good having your finger on the pulse when it comes to the numbers and reporting them brilliantly. It's not even enough to be able to use them to spot where things are going wrong. In retail, all that stuff is bound up in marketing, customer service, supply chain management, stock control - only by being financial controller of all those things can you control any one of them. So here's to a silo-less world - and to the benefits of "connected" controllers as extoleld by one FD.