Take Math

Like many people, even very smart ones, Chief Financial Officers have difficulty seeing the value of new technologies; the costs are high and the benefits often unclear. That's one reason organizations have been slow to adopt big data.

Many chief financial officers say big-data technologies—which use high-performance computing to organize and analyze impossibly large volumes of information—would make their jobs more complicated and might not be worth the extra cost. They say their existing tools, mainly sophisticated financial dashboards that can crunch an organization's numbers in real time, are adequate for their financial-planning needs.

The WSJ article goes on to cite a couple of examples of big-data implementation, Chevron's accounts payable audits and IBM's risk scorecard for international expansion. But CFO's will need more than those to justify the out-of-pocket costs, not to mention the disruption, of installing new data collection and analytic systems.

However quickly the technology is adopted, companies of medium size or larger will need to have at least a few "quants" on their staff to keep up with developments, if only for defensive reasons. When deciding how to make your expensive college degree pay off, kids, do the math and take math.