Forbes: Hatching Innovation In Sustainability And Tech: A Q&A With Rembrandt’s CFO

“Information technology and finance/accounting are very complementary. One often hears that a finance/accounting department is only as good as the data provided. The same is true for good IT departments. IT provides systems and tools for both data collection and data consumption. Accounting is the number one consumer of IT data. It is very important for the IT team to provide means to collect and maintain data used to inform the business profitability.”

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CFO Magazine: Prakash Hariharan: ‘CFOs Need to Have a Good Partner Ecosystem’

“However, we believe in order for you to be able to manage a problem like [inflation], you need to have the ability to make some forward-looking decisions coupled with a few scenarios. Think about scenario analysis as a method that organizations are now using to make flexible medium to long-term plans. You start with identifying one of your driving forces — it could be around revenue, cost, or margin — and then you identify the uncertainties within this broader objective, and then you develop models. And as the scenarios play out, you get to execute a set of predefined actions.

All of that requires you to get data insights across the enterprise, and maybe outside the enterprise as well. A few forward-looking statistical models. And as you learn more in terms of the evolving situation, you need to act — you need to hone in on one of the [levers] or scenarios that you can take a set of actions.”

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CFO Journal: Finance at the Center of Data and Analysis at Coca-Cola

“The power of having datasets and data systems that can integrate with each other and connect with others across the enterprise is enormous. That is a big part of what we are doing now. Finance has a critical role to play—to set the tone, to inject the focus and the discipline, and to make sure that we stay the course, working closely with our functional and operational counterparts.”

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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 Journal: Got Data? Now Create the Right Operating Model

“Companies embracing an ED&A operating model have the opportunity to unite the enterprise around data and make everyone aware of and accountable for its strategic value. By eliminating data silos and introducing data governance, they give the enterprise transparency and access to high-quality and expanded datasets that enable use cases previously considered out of reach. Data and analytics become available as a service through modular platforms grounded in a common data architecture. Instead of just hindsight, data starts delivering foresight.”

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CFO Magazine: Data Centralization Provides Operational Insights

“Traditionally, management viewed data centralization platforms like data warehouses as cost centers under the chief technology officer’s purview. However, as businesses and sponsors face ongoing pressures to maximize return on their investments, strategies like data warehousing became increasingly part of a strategy to generate profits.”

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CFO Journal: How to Act in the Face of Uncertainty

“Until recently, business leaders could assume that the immediate future would bear enough resemblance to the recent past that they could construct sturdy forecasts out of the data, assumptions, and real-world experience they’d been accumulating. Relying on continuity from past events, however, has always been a specious practice, especially in fast-moving industries, and can be existentially dangerous today.”

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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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SF Magazine: Explanatory Data Visualizations

“Given the speed and volume of data collection in business, managers need ways to make sense of large sets of data to help inform decision making and to help communicate results. Data visualization is a powerful tool that can be used to both facilitate and influence decision making. The power of data visualization is in the ability to identify what might have otherwise gone undetected. It not only helps to make sense of large sets of data but can also help to uncover patterns or trends that might otherwise go undetected.”

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