The best CFOs understand the need for advanced technologies—and teams skilled in using them—to deliver better insights that strengthen the business and create value. Learn how finance leaders can map out a successful future for their organizations.
In a time of sustained, macro-level uncertainty, today’s most relevant CFOs are focused on building the business while delivering truly transformative initiatives. They also have a heightened awareness of emerging technologies and capabilities.
In his recent report “Top Priorities for Today’s Most Relevant CFOs,” author Brian Sommer, CEO at TechVenture, a marketing-strategy and content firm and parent company of Vital Analysis, examines the defining traits of forward-looking CFOs.
Who are these exceptional CFOs? They share the following characteristics, among others discussed in the Workday-sponsored report.
Modern CFOs are transformation experts who use new, advanced technologies to deliver meaningful change. To achieve this, they need the right people with the right skills. After all, CFOs are only as effective as their teams. Great CFOs create work environments where their people want to stay and thrive. These finance leaders nurture professional development, offer mentoring, and develop clear career paths—not just jobs.
Leading CFOs need future-ready teams skilled in advanced technologies. Finance personnel with expertise in these technologies will be in great demand—both by finance teams and by other company functions. CFOs will need skilled team members who can support transformation initiatives not only for finance but for the rest of the organization as well.
Critically, these CFOs don’t burden their highly skilled teams with outmoded enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology. Instead, they use software that provides a fresh, modern, and intuitive employee experience—one that’s both mobile friendly and remote-ready. In short, they’re ready to move beyond the ERP systems of the past.
Much has been written recently on the topic of agility, but much less so on scalability. Agility concerns an organization’s ability to rapidly change its products, services, operations, processes, or people. Scalability involves a business’s ability to grow or contract proportionally—so that revenue continues to outpace cost, even amid organic growth or mergers and acquisitions.
Modern CFOs are transformation experts who use new, advanced technologies to deliver meaningful change. To achieve this, they need the right people with the right skills.
Great finance leaders know that the solutions that work for a company of one size may fall woefully short for a larger entity. These CFOs spot scalability issues when, for instance, they see error-prone accounting integrations or significant reliance on spreadsheets instead of digital records.
Today’s most relevant CFOs anticipate the company’s future state and proactively prepare their people, processes, and technology. These finance leaders leverage technology that can scale quickly—accommodating organic and inorganic growth as well as acquisitions and divestitures. They use multi-tenant cloud solutions that are always secure and current, and can scale up and down with the company. And they eschew technical debt, poorly integrated systems, data latency, and data redundancy.
Modern CFOs marshal and exploit data from beyond accounting systems. They use external, third-party data to help the company achieve better business outcomes and generate value. These leaders continue to rely on tried-and-true financial transactions and systems, but they also leverage new, often highly granular data from outside the company. Weather data, for example, could affect store sales. Social-media sentiment data could illuminate telltale consumer concerns.
Top CFOs will use this new data in a variety of ways—from Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, which provide new insights into pricing and preventative maintenance, to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools that can improve the efficiency and accuracy of finance operations.
CFOs will need skilled team members who can support transformation initiatives not only for finance but for the rest of the organization as well.
Amid a series of business upheavals in recent years, many companies have had to change the way they do business—and as a result, the way they measure and analyze their financial performance. In this context, companies will need finance to take advantage of any number of advanced technologies. These could include chatbots that handle employee, supplier, and customer queries. Robotic process automation could deal with routine, repetitive accounting transactions. ML tools could identify patterns and suggest courses of action. And sophisticated workflow tools could rapidly route materials and issues to decision-makers, so that real-time decision-making becomes the norm.
Providing a framework for getting started, the report outlines several key activities for the modern, relevant CFO’s first 90 days. These activities include:
Meeting with finance, human resources (HR), operations, and sales staff to learn how emerging technologies can help them do their jobs better.
Teaming up with their HR partners to create a plan for attracting and retaining employees with the skills needed today and in the future.
Launching a project that shows how advanced technologies and big data can improve just one outdated finance process, such as a spreadsheet or a nonautomated close.
Whatever initiative the modern CFO chooses, the key is getting started—the sooner, the better.
Read the full report: “Top Priorities for Today’s Most Relevant CFOs.”
Our global survey on digital acceleration finds that business leaders took a more measured approach in 2021 compared with the previous year. Read on to learn more about what respondents ranked as the top barriers to digital transformation.
As CFOs are tasked with more responsibilities, one way to create greater value across the enterprise is to envision what next-level financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams will look like. McKinsey & Co. expert Michele Tam identifies considerations for finance leaders looking to the future.
More Reading
Profitable, sustainable growth is the closest thing the business sector has to nirvana—but achieving this state has proved particularly challenging in recent years. An insightful webinar highlights McKinsey & Company research into how companies can move the needle.
Digital transformation gave the global tax and compliance provider unprecedented insight into its data. In the process, the organization also leveled up its finance and accounting teams to provide greater value for the business.
We’re honored to once again be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software for our completeness of vision and ability to execute.
