Impact of Business Intelligence on Accounting Function

This section deals with understanding the concept of Business Intelligence. As a management accountant, it is needed to recommend about implementation of business intelligence software for the given business organization (Wu, Chen & Olson, 2014). The boss and the Finance Director had asked the Management accountant to conduct some research on the potential impact of Business Intelligence on the accounting function within the business enterprise. By using appropriate academic literature, the present study illustrate upon the impact of Business Intelligence that it had on all areas of accounting. The study even highlights the potential impact of Business Intelligence that it had on role of a management accountant.

The term “Business Intelligence” deals with technologies as well as practices and application that are used for collecting, integrating and presenting the business information in required format (Vossen, 2014). Addition to that, the main purpose of Business Intelligence is to involve in better decision-making process and it is mostly driven with data Decision support systems. However, Business Intelligence is one of the technology driven process that help in analyzing and presenting the actionable information in front of the managers, corporate end users and executives for making informed business decisions. Business Intelligence encompasses usage of wide range of tools as well as applications and technologies that help business enterprise for collecting data from external sources and preparing it for analyzing and developing and running queries against that data.

Business Intelligence can be used within all areas of accounting as its usage guide corporate executives and accounting managers to undertake more informed business decisions (Sharda, Delen & Turban, 2016). It is needed for this organization to make use of Business Intelligence as it cut costs as well as recognize new trade opportunities and spot any incompetent trade process ripe for re-engineering. However, Business Intelligence as a regulation is considered as technology-driven procedure that comprises of numerous behavior used in all areas of accounting and these include data mining, online systematic processing as well as querying and exposure at the same time.

Accounts receivable departments can make use of these key performance indicators for tracking forecasted cash flows. It is important to understand the fact that accounting services can make use of Business Intelligence for quantifying their own performance.

Their Boss or Finance Directors ask the Management accountants about Business Intelligence and its need to use in their business organization (Sauter, 2014). To answer this, some accountants get scared as they are of the opinion that Business Intelligence is replacing some of the services that they used to deliver for so many years. It is for this reason why firstly management accountants should have proper understanding about Business Intelligence and it is used to get results of Business Analytics so that it become more valuable to their business enterprise as compared to previous years. After these accountants have proper understanding about Business Intelligence, it will be then easy to extract and measure key performance indicators within the business (Richards et al., 2017). Nowadays, business organizations are starting to look at the information and content that should not be treated on separate manner but instead needed to be managed in an incorporated venture approach. Addition to that, Enterprise information management helps in bringing together both Business Intelligence as well as Enterprise Content management. It is necessary for the business organization to move towards prepared trade intelligence that is presently served as well as unconcealed by vendors. Therefore, Business Intelligence vendor’s aims at targeting only top of the pyramid areas.  A paradigm shift present aims at making Business Intelligence to the bottom of the pyramid with a focus to get access to self-service business intelligence

Definition and Purpose of Business Intelligence

One of the most vital roles that Management accountant plays at the time of implementing Business Intelligence strategy is that of providing critical analytics that assist decision-makers within the business enterprise. Addition to that, an effective Business Intelligence can change the whole game plan in business enterprise by providing real insights of information into the health of each area.

• Deciding on the outcome needed at the time of implementing such strategy (Popovi? et al., 2014)
• Examining the structure of the company and keeping a note of requirement at each level.
• Getting management buy in and it is essential that there is support from the Top-level management because the success of the strategy hugely depends upon trusting the results generated from analytics at the time of undertaking decision-making process
• It is necessary to select the suitable analytical Business Intelligence tools and then use it strategically as and when required (Laursen & Thorlund, 2016)
• Assessing whether a portfolio of Business Intelligence tools is needed of if a single package would be sufficient. It is necessary to determine the nature of the business as well as size and the analytical requirements.
• Analytics used should be presented in front of the managers as well as stakeholders of a company with proper fact-based data from where proper decisions can be taken (Chang, 2014)

At the end of the study, it is concluded that the business organization should engage in implementing Business Intelligence software. After implementing Business Intelligence software, the business organization can easily involve in speeding up and improving in decision-making process, optimization of interior trade process, increased prepared competence, driving new revenues, gaining competitive advantages against competitive rivalry firms. The business organization can even find it easy to identify certain market trends as well as spot business problems that further needs to be resolved. Using Business Intelligence tools help business organization as it is completely data-driven Decision Support Systems. This tool can be used at the time of briefing books, preparing reports, query tools as well as executive information systems. By using this tool, the business enterprise can start examining the information all by them rather than waiting for an IT expert to run any complex reports. However, the generated data helps in accessing users to undertake trade decisions for the company.

This section explains about recent Ransomware Outbreak that took place in May 2017. As an accountant in a local hospital, the CEO had asked to provide advice to management on matters relating to Ransomware attack (Simmonds, 2017). The CFO has provided accountant with an article that speaks about Ransomware attack that is even readily available in Interact resources. The business report clearly presents an overview of Ransomware attack. The segment even explains about the key risk areas where the hospital may be exposed to a Ransomware attack. Each of the risk areas are mentioned in the business reports with its specific controls. At the end of the business report, recommendations are provided that should be implemented by the hospital to protect the organization from the key risk areas relating to a Ransomware attack (Pope, 2016).

The article that was provided by CFO was published on 13^th May 2017 and the title of the article is “Biggest Ransomware outbreak in history that hits nearly 100 countries with data held for ransom” (Laszka, Farhang & Grossklags, 2017).  Most of the countries were affected by this enormous cyber extortion attack where locked computers and used files of users for ransom at various hospitals, companies and even government agencies. This Ransomware attack was caused by a self-replicating piece of software that took advantages of vulnerabilities as shown in older version of Microsoft Windows. This attack spread from one computer to other computer as it enables to find the exposed targets. Furthermore, this ransom demands starts with an amount of &US 300 and it even increases after 2 hours as noted by security researcher (Kruse et al., 2017).

Applications of Business Intelligence in Accounting

Most of these troublesome attacks were accounted in countries like Britain where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away their patients after they lost contact to computers (Jarrett, 2017). The other countries that were targeted by this attack were Spain, Portugal and Russia. Recent Ransomware attack at hospitals left some of the experts worried because patent care could suffer hugely. An individual losing its email can be treated annoying factor but patients records are needed in order to treat patients (Brewer, 2016).

The above risk identified are really dangerous and hospitals need to find ways where they can minimize the risk from this attack as far as possible (Gupta & Tripathi, 2017). Private security firms had eventually recognized Ransomware as a new alternative and it repeatedly spread across large networks by exploiting a known bug in Microsoft Windows operating system. The local hospitals are targeted for numerous reasons as the end users relies heavily upon electronic health records as well as it is important to have a system that can be always accessible. In cases, if Ransomware attack is detected, then this local hospital need to opt for paying the ransom as well as recovering their files as far as possible. This will motivates cyber criminals to make more attempts at other local hospitals (Chinthapalli, 2017).

• Increased funding for end-user training- It is important to consider the fact that more than 40% of spam email consists of malicious content like link to websites or any type of attachments that contain viruses as well as Ransomware. It is suggested to hospital employees that should use modern email protection as well as engage in filtering solutions.
• Enhanced email protections as well as endpoint security- In the year 2017, it is noted that IT departments will look for ways to roll out for getting access to more advanced functionalities like advanced URL detonation, URL redirection, attachment scanning for malicious content.  
• More protection at the browser level- It is recommended to the local hospital to make use of new browser based security tools for protecting the endpoints at the browser level. It is advised to purchase the tools that will expand the protections in local hospitals for the end-users who continuously use the web for work-related activities.
• Disaster recovery as a service- The year 2017 will definitely take into account an increase in investments towards use of tools as well as solutions that can protect against and prevent a local hospital with a Ransomware attack. Some of the IT Departments are planning to adjust their disaster recovery plans that ensure that their systems can recover quickly as well as fully in case of any major Ransomware infection.

Ransomware is not only a major threat to local hospital but also it is pushing the security budget largely. The main concern of the hackers being inside the hospital networks is to put IT executives on the edge at the time of publicizing data breaches. It is advised to roll out network monitoring as well as security tools that aligns with advanced traffic pattern analysis and the intrusion detection. Some of the tools had been introduced that gain interest along with managing certain security services that takes into account security specialists who monitors the function network 24/7.

Conclusion 

At the end of the study, it is concluded that local hospitals will carry on to be prime target for these Ransomware attack in the year 2017. However, IT can stop an attack by continuous training of end users on email best practices as well as checking network traffic in the most appropriate way. The year 2016 was marked with an increase in cyber attacks in and against healthcare business organization. The Ransomware attack can lead to life-threatening results in local hospitals when they fully affect the various systems and the caregivers relies upon certain actions during the treatment of patients.

Reference List

Brewer, R. (2016). Ransomware attacks: detection, prevention and cure. Network Security, 2016(9), 5-9.

Chang, V. (2014). The business intelligence as a service in the cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, 37, 512-534.

Chinthapalli, K. (2017). The hackers holding hospitals to ransom. BMJ, 357, j2214.

Gupta, G., & Tripathi, K. (2017). STUDY ON RANSOMWARE ATTACK AND ITS PREVENTION. International Education and Research Journal, 3(5).

Jarrett, M. P. (2017). Cybersecurity—A Serious Patient Care Concern. Jama, 318(14), 1319-1320.

Kruse, C. S., Frederick, B., Jacobson, T., & Monticone, D. K. (2017). Cybersecurity in healthcare: A systematic review of modern threats and trends. Technology and Health Care, 25(1), 1-10.

Laszka, A., Farhang, S., & Grossklags, J. (2017, October). On the Economics of Ransomware. In International Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security (pp. 397-417). Springer, Cham.

Laursen, G. H., & Thorlund, J. (2016). Business analytics for managers: Taking business intelligence beyond reporting. John Wiley & Sons.

Pope, J. (2016). Ransomware: Minimizing the Risks. Innovations in clinical neuroscience, 13(11-12), 37.

Popovi?, A., Hackney, R., Coelho, P. S., & Jakli?, J. (2014). How information-sharing values influence the use of information systems: An investigation in the business intelligence systems context. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 23(4), 270-283.

Richards, G., Yeoh, W., Chong, A. Y. L., & Popovi?, A. (2017). Business intelligence effectiveness and corporate performance management: An empirical analysis. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 1-9.

Sauter, V. L. (2014). Decision support systems for business intelligence. John Wiley & Sons.

Sharda, R., Delen, D., & Turban, E. (2016). Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Data Science: A Managerial Perspective. Pearson.

Simmonds, M. (2017). How businesses can navigate the growing tide of ransomware attacks. Computer Fraud & Security, 2017(3), 9-12.

Vossen, G. (2014). Big data as the new enabler in business and other intelligence. Vietnam Journal of Computer Science, 1(1), 3-14.

Wu, D. D., Chen, S. H., & Olson, D. L. (2014). Business intelligence in risk management: Some recent progresses. Information Sciences, 256, 1-7.