SF Magazine: Managing Digital Transformation

“Develop a data-driven decision culture: CFOs and senior finance professionals can promote a data-driven decision culture by challenging finance employees as well as the business on the basis of data and insights rather than opinions. Finance is in an excellent position to fulfill this role, as it has a complete overview of the organization.”

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Industry Week: Operations Managers: Rising to the Challenges of 2021

“Operations leaders remain under pressure to deliver outstanding results. It is important to remember that simply driving efficiency and reducing costs are not everything.”

“To create a truly resilient organization, it is critical to fully align technology with people and processes.”

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CFO Magazine: A New Year’s Resolution: The CFO Should Own Digital Transformation

Sanjay Purohit gives 5 reasons why the CFO’s role in digital transformation (DX) is paramount:

1. Successful DX is data-fueled. 

2. DX increases risk.

3. Digitalization demands centralization.

4. Transformation has a timeline.

5. The road to process transformation runs through finance. 

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CFO Journal: C-Suite Insights: Digital Growth Fuels CEO Optimism

““There is a consistent view across Deloitte’s client base that the pandemic has created significant new opportunities for their companies,” Ucuzoglu says. “Even in an environment where it’s challenging to find cash to invest, what we’re seeing is that clients are prioritizing investments in technology, software, and cloud migration. I’m optimistic around the potential for the real economy to experience a long period of tech-driven growth coming out of this.””

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McKinsey: Solving the digital and analytics scale-up challenge in consumer goods

“In the early days of digital and analytics transformations, companies prioritized individual use cases, largely in the commercial functions, based on feasibility and impact. To support the highest-priority use cases, companies then established a set of broad-based enablers—for instance, a data lake, a technology stack, and a technical organization that housed all newer talent profiles, such as data scientists. In theory, these enablers would meet the needs of the entire enterprise. In practice, however, generic enablers rarely meet specific business requirements. Successfully scaling up digital and analytics efforts thus requires a different approach: one that prioritizes fully enabled domain transformations rather than unrelated use cases.”

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McKinsey: How to become ‘tech forward’: A technology-transformation approach that works

“The current COVID-19 crisis, of course, is having a significant impact on how CIOs and businesses manage tech transformations. Despite the pressures it has added to costs, however, the urgency to get moving and transform has never been higher, according to many CIOs. But while the demands placed on the technology function have grown, so too have the opportunities. Experience suggests that the most effective transformations are not only comprehensive, covering the function’s role, delivery model, and core systems, but also sequenced to ensure that changes that reinforce each other are carried out together. With up-front planning focused on business value and careful delivery, a company can bring its technology function forward and gain the capabilities to thrive in challenging digital markets.”

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CFO Dive: 4 cost management mistakes for CFOs to avoid in 2021

Gartner analysts highlighted four of the most common mistakes CFOs make as they narrow their focus on cost optimization amid a prolonged economic downturn:

1. Making blanket cuts with unrealistic targets
2. Failing to sustain behavior change
3. Slowing down the organization
4. Choking off innovation

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CFO Magazine: Preparing for an Uncertain Future Requires Agility

There are several roadblocks to a full-fledged commitment to finance digital transformation. Some of those include:

• Legacy platforms make significant cross-functional changes difficult to execute
• Little or no resources committed to reskilling
• Inadequate change management processes
• Difficult to perform cost-benefit analysis because there aren’t always hard-dollar benefits

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McKinsey: Overcoming the Core-Technology Transformation Stalemate

“Which approach describes your digital transformation? “Repaint” by making the minimum investment required to maintain existing operations and digital channels; “renovate” through gradual but persistent upgrades of the core and more substantial improvements when necessary; and “rebuild and replace,” by building or buying a completely new IT stack (or large portions of it) and migrating the existing business to it. As companies progress on their transformation journey, they may switch from one archetype to another.”

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