CFO Magazine: Growing Pains: Stuck on Excel

“But “Excel is not a good tool when you’re seeking to coordinate the operation of a multinational company,” said Bruce Lynn, managing partner of The Financial Executives Consulting Group (FECG). “I have my spreadsheet, you have your spreadsheet, everybody else has their spreadsheets, and none of them talk to each other.”

Still, many finance departments are reluctant to let go of Excel even when more powerful purpose-built applications are available.”

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Forbes: The Big 2022 Trends For CFOs: Digital, Talent Retention And Remote Work

“One of the top focus areas for our team as we emerge from the pandemic amid the rapid, relentless pace of change is prioritizing data management to improve reporting and, ultimately, insights. As part of transforming the finance function at MassMutual to help us create more time to add analytical and creative value, having access to clean and organized data is key. Overall, I think this continues to be an opportunity for finance organizations so they can be more efficient and make informed, real-time recommendations leveraging data and technology as strategic advisors to the business.”

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Harvard Business Review: Why Becoming a Data-Driven Organization Is So Hard

“Right now, the biggest challenge for organizations working on their data strategy might not have to do with technology at all. In the latest NewVantage Partners annual survey, which tracks the progress of corporate data initiatives, corporate chief data, information, and analytics executives reported that cultural change is the most critical business imperative.”

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CFO Dive: Bad Use of FP&A Costs U.S. Companies $7.8B a Year

“Manual data inputting leads to errors, which can lead to reputational hits. It also leads to siloed operations, which can put an organization at the mercy of a single employee. When a bookkeeper at the Florida Republican Party passed away, the organization couldn’t access the data the person managed, causing it to miss a Federal Election Commission reporting deadline. “The employee did not share with other members how to work the software, rendering it unworkable after he died,” the report says. That kind of thing, along with reporting errors, can impact the organization’s reputation, which, for a company relying on investment capital, can impact the amount of money it can attract and at what cost.”

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SF Magazine: Change Management in Disguise

“The success of an analytics transformation depends on the success not only of the technical solution, but also the change management. In other words, organizations need to both drive the business and understand how to go from hindsight to foresight.”

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Industry Week: Too Often, the Right Data Isn’t Getting to the Right Person (Even within Their Own Team)

“Closing the loop means establishing a system where the data is embedded into a continuous feedback process across the formerly siloed teams. Establishing this seamless data continuity fosters a data-driven culture where employees make decisions on a common set of accurate and up-to-date information.”

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CFO Dive: Data, Communications Pose Hidden Scaling Costs

“The central lesson from the exercise, Nucci said, is the hidden cost of misaligned analytics on a company’s ability to scale its operations efficiently. 

“I regret not taking the time to [centralize analytic operations] and have that single source of truth from a data perspective from the beginning””.

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CFO Journal: Built-to-Evolve Data Can Help Transform Finance

“A finance data model or enterprise information model transforms a generic ERP package into a specific structure to fit an organization’s business needs. Ideally, such a model would be tailored to the organization’s business activities and priorities while still allowing flexibility for new product launches, reorganizations, or acquisitions. A complex, layered, and well-defined enterprise information model can provide the business with flexible reporting, harmonized transaction processing, business model agility, and expanded views of transactions and profitability.”

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CFO Magazine: Can Excel Survive?

“But old dogs can’t always learn new tricks. While Excel has shown remarkable staying power, some experts believe it may now be challenged beyond its reach. Companies big and small increasingly need to automatically pull their financial data from multiple cloud-based systems and utilize more advanced data analytics. Excel may be a roadblock to that…While Excel is often used as a collection point for data from other systems, it is still a “manual and largely siloed vehicle”…Excel’s limited ability to handle massive data sets “can lead to long processing times and more steps than other database tools.””

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