Workday Global Study: Why the CFO Is Crucial to a Data-Driven Future

Finance leaders have a significant opportunity—and responsibility—to spearhead digital transformation. Why? Because our research shows they have further to go and more to gain.

The top roadblocks stopping businesses from reaching their digital transformation goals are workforce skills (38%) and cultural barriers such as trust, transparency, and engagement (35%), according to “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation,” our global survey of 1,150 senior business executives. But these figures rise to 46% (skills as barrier) and 56% (culture as barrier) among CFOs. 

The survey responses show CFOs have a strong awareness of organizational culture, and they’re poised to effect change:

• 24% of finance leaders say the most important element they need to accelerate planning, execution, and analysis cycles are technologies that help them to integrate data between disparate systems and break down internal data silos.
• 21% say technology that unifies financial, people, and operational data is most critical.

“Access to data is the crux of most technology issues in any company,” agrees Jennifer LaClair, CFO at digital financial services firm Ally Financial. “Data needs to be the responsibility of everyone in an organization, and that’s the approach we have taken at Ally—every leader and every employee is a tech leader.”

It’s a different story elsewhere. Many organizations overhauled their internal structures during the pandemic, but only 46% of leaders say they are digitally well equipped to ensure business continuity in times of crisis. Among CFOs, that figure falls to just 22%. 

Finance Grapples With Data Overload

Why is it such a problem for finance leaders? It’s partly due to the multiple and competing sources of data they have to sift through. “The size of data growth that needs to be processed is very high, and there is more variety,” says Herman Widjaja, CTO at Tokopedia, one of Indonesia’s largest technology companies. “Human intelligence can no longer keep up with processing it.” 

As the need grows for a single source of truth within these oceans of data, the C-suite will turn to artificial intelligence analytics to crunch the numbers, predicts Pete Schlampp, Workday chief strategy officer. “There’s so much data that you need to ask 100,000 different questions of it to really get at the insights,” he says. “That’s where we have to rely on machines to help us find the trends that we need to look at.”

CFOs Know It’s Time to Transform 

Our research suggests CFOs lag behind other business leaders when it comes to this kind of transformation, but that situation is evolving. 

“Typically, it’s been: ‘Three years from now, we’re going to transform, we’re going to digitize,’” says Schlampp. “Now, instead of calendar year 2025, [those projects] are moving into calendar years 2022, 2023, and 2024. CFOs are coming out of the pandemic and saying, ‘We can’t go forward like this any more, we know that we need to transform.’”

This attitude shift is leading to newfound ties between CFOs and CIOs, as finance leaders recognize the power of technology to bring them the data insights they need. Combined with their determination to overcome people silos elsewhere, CFOs are ready to lead their organizations’ evolution to a data-driven culture.

Download the full report “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation” for more findings from the office of the CFO, CIO, and CHRO.