According to a recent report by ace consultants, auditors and accountants, PwC, finance departments continue to devote almost 60% of their time to gathering data as opposed to analysing it.

Comment: Such findings may appear crazy to you or me but accountants – and therefore finance departments – rule the business world. What they say, goes. If they want to employ so-called spreadsheet jockeys to waste their resources and skills, they can. It will need some sort of business revolution – perhaps spurred by a radical re-thinking of markets prompted by new ways of doing business, such as is being brought about by the internet – to show that business is not about collecting figures but, rather, it is about people interacting.