The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: strategic data
CFO Magazine: The CFO’s Role in Building Data-Driven Workflows
“Some teams utilize a financial planning tool that aggregates data from various systems, such as accounting ERP systems, customer relationship management databases, human resources systems, and customer success systems. This provides holistic visibility into key financial and operational metrics of a company.”
FP&A Trends: Why Should We Care About Data Governance and Data Literacy?
“To understand the importance of data governance, we need to understand the risks of poor data governance:
- Poor data quality
- Poor and wrong decision-making
- Increased forecast risk
- Increased percentage of unstructured data
- Fractured data sources”
CFO Insights: Finance 2025: Looking Ahead With the Benefit of Hindsight
“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.”
SF Magazine: Storytelling in Data Strategy
“If you’re sharing a forecasting model that’s created through the coding language Python, for example, and you know your audience members aren’t coders, avoid detailing lines of code and explaining the testing. Instead, explain how the forecasting was done covering criteria, confidence levels, and other relevant data. If you’re speaking to members of the finance data and analytics center of excellence, you might want to go through the robustness of the model and testing done. They would love to get technical.”
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.”
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.”
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”
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.”
CFO Journal: It’s Time for a Controllership Reboot
“The pandemic brought with it an unpredictable global environment and uncertain future. This decreased the value of historical financial reporting while increasing the need for real-time reporting, including data analysis, and predictive forecasting. Finding new ways to leverage real-time data and new forecast models, controllership could manage against multiple views and plausible scenarios to remain agile and resilient against an unpredictable future.”