CFO Journal: Check it Twice: A Checklist for Rethinking Capital Allocation

CFO Journal came up with a checklist for re-evaluating your allocations strategy – and here are some of the items on that list:

“Data. Do you have the data and insights you need to make informed decisions? Work with your stakeholders to determine what those are, where they need to come from, and how you can get them.

Tools. Where could data analytics, scenario planning, and risk-sensing tools improve your decision-making? Which tools do you already have, and which do you need? Engage your stakeholders on what data they need to generate from their business units.”

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SF Magazine: Advancing Digital Transformation

“Accounting and financial professionals have relied on spreadsheets for decades, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a reluctance to adopt other analytics tools. As Pamela Schmidt, Kimberly Swanson Church, and Jennifer Riley wrote in “Breaking the Excel Routine” (Strategic Finance, March 2020), “a bias toward the status quo use of Excel has hampered widespread adoption of more advanced data analytics technology tools.” Furthermore, Molly Boyle points to a need for real change in “The Real Costs of Manual Accounting” (Strategic Finance, September 2020): “The way accounting has always been done isn’t sustainable—especially in the current environment. Manual processes tend to be chaotic and time-consuming…”

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FP&A Trends: The Key Steps to Fostering a Data-Driven Culture

“Technology is not the key issue to implement a data-driven culture within an organisation. The first crucial task is to determine the data strategy and focus on the business problem. To be successful though, embracing the changing culture is the most important aspect of all”

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Industry Week: A National Supply Chain Dashboard Could Prevent Bottlenecks—but It’s Not There Yet

“To improve supply chain efficiency and resiliency, this dashboard must collect and share granular-level real-time data about container movements at the ports; train and truck movements to and from warehouses; and inventory movements to retailers. It is essential for the government to cooperate and collaborate with private companies to collect and aggregate this requisite data. Only by analyzing this data can one predict supply chain performance in the near future.”

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FP&A Trends: Corporate Performance Management in the Age of Agility

One of the key transformation pillars for FP&A Teams is to “optimize the use of technology:

• Digitalise the forecasting and reporting cycle to promote collaboration and access to data while ensuring security and traceability
• Take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (including analytics) to solve current problems and improve its ability to anticipate, decide and act
• Equip yourself with a modern reporting tool that allows users to easily access data, conduct their own analyses, and define their own dashboards (taking into account mobility needs, if applicable)”

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McKinsey: The CIO agenda for the next 12 months: Six make-or-break priorities

“The biggest issue with data is that there’s so much of it that companies have tremendous difficulty making sense of it. Data users can spend between 30 to 40 percent of their time searching for data and 20 to 30 percent on cleansing it. The result is often a kind of data drunkenness where companies chase after different ideas in an uncoordinated and disjointed fashion. In effect, they’re trying to manage the scale rather than extract the value.”

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CFO Magazine: The ABCs of CPM Software

“While some CFOs are ahead of the curve in using CPM, most are not. They often see spreadsheets as the quickest and fastest way to stand up some level of CPM-related competencies. Unfortunately, that approach is usually not very successful.”

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CFO Journal: Finance 2025: Operating Models, Data Integration, ERP, and the Workforce

“Does your company have a streamlined finance data infrastructure that can help you take advantage of advanced technologies and deliver insights? Finance data serves as a core foundational component of other accelerants, such as extracting an increasingly sophisticated level of business insights that can drive corporate strategy and are also relevant to stakeholders. This will require a comprehensive driver-based data architecture that tells the full back story and doesn’t just report on the outcomes without the underlying causes.”

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CFO Journal: Modernized Reporting for a Rapidly Changing World

“Connected, integrated reporting can provide many benefits to organizations by helping produce consistent, high-quality data through a streamlined process to enable improved business decisions. This reporting model can shift an organization’s focus away from collecting and reconciling data toward exceptions or anomalies that warrant scrutiny.”

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