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 Dive: Only 5% of CFOs Have 'Future-Ready' Operations: Survey

“For 27% of finance leaders, the necessary data is trapped across systems or organized manually in spreadsheets, which prevents them from drawing insights and value.”

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SF Magazine: Data as a Strategic Asset

“As accounting leaders, we must actively contribute to the discussions around data management, valuation of data, and recognition of enterprise data value as an asset on the financial reports. We must focus on providing value by producing high-quality, data-driven insights through applying data analytics to ensure organizational success.”

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SF Magazine: Financial Forecasting Amid COVID-19

“Companies are missing opportunities to grow revenue and improve margins by approaching the data they collect too narrowly.”

Here are “three steps to move toward dynamic planning”:

1. Democratize your data
2. Bring financial data into operations
3. Bring financial data into strategy

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SF Magazine: The Digitization Essentials

This article from Strategic Finance Magazine lists competency in information systems, data governance, data analytics, and data visualization are the keys to an effective digitization strategy.

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Harvard Business Review: Why Is It So Hard to Become a Data-Driven Company?

“To compete today, companies need to be data-driven. But for mainstream, legacy companies, that’s easier said than done. Despite a decade of investment and the adoption of Chief Data Officers, this survey of Fortune 1000 senior executives finds that many companies are still struggling against not just legacy tech, but embedded cultures that are resistant to new ways of doing things.”

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SF Magazine: Preparing the Finance Function for Technological Change

“With so many technologies emerging and evolving rapidly, choosing where to begin can be a challenge. An important initial step should be developing a strategy to effectively use the leading-edge technology and analytics techniques required to become a data-driven organization. Development of this strategy starts with considering finance’s business goals.”

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The Role of Data Analytics

“The broad reach and wide applicability of data analytics across industries and professions have been known for decades, but the essential role of data analytics in delivering a competitive advantage to businesses, efficiently enhancing value delivery, and revolutionizing the role of business professionals is now undisputed. Even more, the enormity of the impact data analytics can have in times of crisis is nearly unparalleled, as evidenced by its contribution to progress during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Read more at Strategic Finance Magazine

McKinsey: Data Governance is Critical to Capturing Value Through Analytics

“Without quality-assuring governance, companies not only miss out on data-driven opportunities; they waste resources. Data processing and cleanup can consume more than half of an analytics team’s time, including that of highly paid data scientists, which limits scalability and frustrates employees. Indeed, the productivity of employees across the organization can suffer: respondents to our 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30 percent of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability.”

Read more at McKinsey Digital >