Today’s CFOs are increasingly digitally literate, not only within their own function, but also across the enterprise. A few are even in the digital driver’s seat — leading enterprise-wide efforts to spread the benefits of the digital revolution across business functions.
The use of digital technology has proven to be an effective way of managing complexity and increasing corporate agility. But there is a catch: This digital revolution is also driving exponential growth in the volume, variety, and velocity of data. And many organizations, saddled with deep silos of ill-defined and unstructured data, lack the combination of big data processing and enterprise analytics capabilities that would help them realize its full potential.
This issue was highlighted in Accenture’s 2014 High Performance Finance Study, which surveyed more than 600 senior finance executives (212 in Europe) across 10 industries. The resulting report, The CFO as Architect of Business Value: Delivering Growth and Managing Complexity, showed that the vast majority of organizations are not yet harnessing the full power of today’s technology. In fact, just 4% of organizations surveyed have fully deployed big data and enterprise analytics capabilities to date, while more than half of respondent organizations (53%) are still focused on using data to explain what has already happened, rather than making future projections.
Thankfully, our research suggests that CFOs are stepping in to help guide the organization in making the most of the technology they have today and the investments they are planning for tomorrow. Their strategic influence is expanding rapidly and their focus reaches far beyond finance, budgeting, accounting, and compliance. This has propelled them into a starring role across the business. For example, 86% of CFOs are driving decision-making or providing input in guiding, prioritizing, and managing technology investment decisions. Meanwhile, 37% are taking a leadership role in monitoring the return on the investment of new technology. Our research also shows that more than one quarter of finance executives are planning to increase investments in big data and analytics by more than 25%. Furthermore, 20% of survey respondents say that in two years’ time, they expect to have fully deployed the technology and processes that will help them cope with processing large volumes of data.
CFO and CIO: High level of collaboration
Although CFOs have significantly deepened their understanding of technology, they still need CIOs and their teams to evaluate, prioritize, implement, and operate the technology solutions to support the business. In turn, they must ensure that the CIO truly understands the issues the organization is facing so that the solutions adequately address the threats and opportunities.
When it comes to big data and analytics, CIOs can and should be helping the CFO to analyze available information and apply the insights it yields to the business. Moreover, because the needs of the organization can change rapidly and unexpectedly, it’s essential that these two executives maintain an open dialog throughout this process so that organizations collect the right information, analyze it in a way that takes into account the business landscape, and then apply it to deliver value.
For the complete survey results, download the report (60 pages) here
