The finance profession, like everything, has its own evolutionary path. With the availability of almost limitless processing power and data storage, the pace of that evolution is accelerating. We will see more change in the next 5 – 10 years than we have seen in our entire history. As finance professionals we must keep pace or risk becoming obsolete, or worse, a detriment to the organizations we serve.
Let’s take a look at that evolution and where we’re headed.
Historically the role of the CFO was filled by strong individuals with high financial acumen and traditional views of finance. Aided by data and technology they could tell you what happened by not necessarily why it happened.
There’s still a place for traditional skills, however, forward-thinking CFOs need to spot issues, make decisions in real-time and predict the future.
As technology evolved it provided the opportunity for the CFO to use real-time data to provide support and analysis to help the business improve performance.
The CFO helped the organization use data to gain crucial strategic insights and catch issues as they occur. What they lack is the ability to see what is happening ahead of time.
While CFO 1.0 can tell their colleagues what happened, CFO 2.0 can add the “why” and help the organization use data to gain crucial strategic insights.
And while CFO 2.0 can catch issues as they occur, they can’t accurately predict where these issues are happening ahead of time.
Research reveals a radical new finance leader that drives strategic change and is a visionary of the future - A new breed of trailblazing finance leaders who use data and emerging technology to create a vision for the future of the business and who are often in the driver’s seat of digital transformation.
Data and predictive analytics allow them to look ahead and plot a new direction, making them one of the most valuable members of the C-suite.
Digital Transformation is creating new opportunities for CFOs.
Over the past 10 years, technology has transformed every aspect of how businesses gain insights from data, which in turn affects how we make decisions and measure success.
While digital transformation has undeniably helped businesses, the pace of advancement has not made the transition an easy one.
Many financial professionals are concerned about keeping up with the speed of change.
97% of financial professionals say their roles have significantly changed in the last five years.
2 Biggest Challenges:
Modernize for Growth and Agility
How can finance leaders guide their organizations to take advantage of this rapid change?
A good starting point is to identify potential challenges and look for ways to address them.
Drivers for Change:
It can be challenging to decide which solutions will provide the best value at the departmental, business unit and organizational levels.
Having clear business priorities and how technology can address them will help businesses prepare for the future.
Changes are Underway
AI Expansion in Finance
The core of the Intelligent GL is helping companies move away from today’s accounting processes, which are largely on monthly or yearly cycles, and making them continuous.
The vision for the Intelligent GL breaks this down into three domains of investment with the explicit goal to deliver continuous value: Accounting, Trust, and Insights.
For accounting, the aim is to eliminate the close. For trust, we need to deliver continuous auditing capabilities, giving users confidence the GL is always accurate and compliant. For Insights, we need to use AI to continuously analyze activity, looking for opportunities and risks, ultimately allowing the CFO to know the unknowns.
This is just a small glimpse of what modern systems are doing to help CFOs free up their time and more rapidly analyze mountains of data to become forward-looking strategic advisors to the business.
As technology evolves, so must our roles as finance leaders. We need to embrace modern systems and processes, take advantage of AI and machine learning as they become available to us and our systems, and we must enable our staff to adapt to this new reality.
We need to:
By doing so you will be setting yourself, your staff, and your organization up for continued success and growth.
If you’d like to learn how a modern, cloud-based financial management system can facilitate your growth, book some time on my calendar for a discussion.