2020 CFO Priorities Includes Integrated Insights

A recent survey from CFO Magazine and Duke University Fuqua School of Business identifies four priorities for CFOs with “Move from Disconnected Spreadsheets to Integrated Insights” topping the list. Finance teams need tools to understand the interdependencies of the decisions made without spending 2.24 hours per day on average sifting through spreadsheets.

Read more at Forbes.com >

Gartner’s Top Five CFO Initiatives for $1B+ Companies

The recent Gartner for Finance survey shares the top five initiatives CFOs of $1B+ companies are prioritizing in 2020: Finance analytics, Finance organization strategy and structure, Finance technology optimization, Growth investments, and Cost structure. Digging deeper into finance analytics, survey respondents felt that insufficient skills for advanced analytics was their top challenge.

Read the Garther for Finance Survey >

Analytics = Preparedness

Is your organization ready for a downturn?

“In today’s analytics landscape, details are less important than trends. A trend line allows prediction and, ultimately, the foresight to act. Analysts must be coached to assign confidence to a trend line and recommend action early. One might posit that a timid analyst with a modern-day toolset is as unfortunate as a Ferrari with a driver riding the brake.”

Read Modern Analytics Can Drive Downturn Preparedness >

AFPs Eight Steps to Rolling Forecasts

With more organizations shifting from traditional budgeting to rolling forecasts, The Association for Financial Professionals has shared their list of 8 steps to help finance teams avoid missteps at every stage from goal setting to tracking performance.

Read the 8 Steps for Creating a Rolling Forecast >

Seeing Into the Future

With just 42% of CFOs and finance leaders indicating that their finance systems give them the information they need to be effective business partners and only 31% of them with a dependable platform for decision making, there’s lots of opportunities for finance teams to evaluate their technology architecture.

Read The Future of Finance Systems Global Survey 2019 >

How CFOs Have Evolved to Support Innovation

CFOs and finance teams play an increasing role in enterprise innovation, and the ones with a solid foundation of enterprise technologies are already ahead of the competition. Most companies view innovation as essential to survival. But without the right leadership and direction from finance, enterprise innovation plans inevitably fall flat or divert precious resources away from worthy projects. Supporting innovation is one of the new challenges for finance, but one that is important for CFOs and their finance teams to get right.

Read More at CFO Magazine >

The Hard Truth About Traditional Data Management

Customers don’t care about your infrastructure or data problems. They just want your organization to know who they are, what they ordered and how to fix their problems. At the same time, businesses want technology to help build great customer experiences while driving to a lower cost structure and making the products they build better using the data they have. And they need it done fast.  These companies have spent millions of dollars trying to modernize their applications, only to still lack real-time access to the data they need. A fundamentally different approach is required to solve the challenges created over the last 30 years and not solved in the last five.

Read More at Forbes Magazine >

What Makes A True Data Analytics-Driven Organization?

Advanced analytics enable businesses to gain insight from data and to better perform in fiercely competitive markets. Most companies today see advanced analytics as the key to drive down costs, improve decision making, and increase customer value. But the challenges of a data analytics implementation can hinder these plans. A business looking to develop advanced analytical capabilities and become data-driven must have the right tools, culture, data, and people to support managerial decision making throughout the use of analytical technologies. Implementing analytics shouldn’t be viewed as “just another IT project.” It’s a fundamental change in the way that organizations do business.

Read More at The Association of Accountants and Financial Professionals in Business >

Data Is the Foundation for Any Successful Business Transformation

 “Business transformation has emerged as one of the most critical endeavors in today’s enterprise. When done properly, it can ensure the livelihood of a business for the foreseeable future. Done wrong, business transformation can leave an enterprise in even worse shape than before, facing the prospect of having to spend big to fix it.”

Most business transformations center around intelligent technologies that can connect the right data, tools and business logic to understand, analyze and evaluate corporate performance. However, none of these technologies will do any good unless it has the ability to access and produce timely, accurate, and consistent data which can be used to make critical business decisions.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >