Automating data for the CFO

Dataquest interviews Jesper Vork, Vice-President of TimeXtender, and a renowned expert on BI.

Tell us about TimeXtender and specifically your role in the company

I’ve been with TimeXtender several years now after several stints at places like Microsoft and in a set of entrepreneurial endeavors. I currently am leading the effort to add a product called TimeXtender Financials to our already existing Data Warehouse Automation business. This product is intended for the Office of the CFO.

So you basically are bringing “data automation” to the Office of the CFO?
Yes, but it goes beyond data automation. Basically, if the CFO can spend more time running the business and innovating versus being caught up in backward looking data and analyzing “old” spreadsheets lacking sufficient data to make decisions, then the entire company moves ahead and prospers. We want to focus on this problem- basically to liberate the CFO from minutiae.

What are the core issues you are traveling to solve; in other words, what is the CFO pain that your solutions helps fix?
We believe the CFO is too often over-looked as a core business driver. People consider the CFO an auditor or a bean-counter. We don’t see it that way, but we need to help get the CFO out of Excel only and spend more time running the business and collaborating with others. That’s the business pain we are working to solve and we believe our software is the first step in that direction.

Did your time at big companies like Lego and Microsoft prepare you for the entrepreneurial world of software?
Absolutely. In large companies like Lego and Microsoft, you learn scale and how to think big. This helps because we imbue our entire culture with ambition and bigness and believe we’ll be a large player in the next few years. Analysts seem to agree so we think we are on the right path!