Data as a Compass empowers finance leaders to transform data into actionable insights. This South African guide combines leadership lessons, practical examples, technical know-how and ethics to help CFOs start, or enhance, their data-driven journey.
Data as a Compass, co-written by Rob van den Wijngaard and Ashley Francis, guides finance professionals on how to harness one of the world’s most valuable resources – data. In a data-dominated world, such a guide is needed now more than ever. It takes the reader on a journey towards building a data-driven organisation, one step at a time, while providing a few leadership lessons along the way.
Ashley, a 2020 CFO of the Year Award nominee, says executives need data to make meaningful decisions. Without a unified blueprint, these same executives become inundated with data because they get bogged down with volume and complexity and don’t know where to start. That’s where Data as a Compass comes in.
“Rob [the co-author] and I wanted to create a guiding vision on how finance leaders can mine their organisation’s data to extract meaningful insights from it,” says Ashley. “We simplified the complexity, drawing on our experiences and research specific to the South African business environment.”
The idea for the book, says Ashley, began after he left his role as CFO at UCT in 2020 to pursue entrepreneurial projects. These ventures included becoming CEO and founder of Safricang, which specialises in investments in food, agriculture, real estate, renewable energy, education and technology, and co-founding Four Minute Medicine, an innovative online medical education platform.
Before leaving UCT, Ashley had established a financially sustainable institution, which was no small feat considering his CFO tenure coincided with student and labour protests between 2015 and 2017. Along with an austerity programme that reduced the university’s costs by R112 million, he also initiated a project digitising the university’s operations. This was how he met Rob.
“Through moving UCT’s finance department from a paper-based system to digitalisation, I encountered Rob, who had digitally transformed Leiden University in the Netherlands, where Albert Einstein once taught. I invited Rob to UCT to get the two universities to collaborate. He returned to the Netherlands just before Covid-19 hit, I left as UCT CFO, and the project unfortunately died. However, we stayed in touch and embarked on a journey with Venda University. It was during these engagements that we decided to put our thoughts together and write a book. We realised we were sitting on a wealth of knowledge and research, and as our writing developed, the process gained impetus.”
Data as a Compass underscores that (re)using data is a proven enabler for achieving significant cost reductions, gaining control over business risks, and identifying process inefficiencies – all while keeping the human perspective at the heart of decision-making. This focus fosters an organisational culture that prioritises employee learning, development and a harmonious work-life balance, creating an environment where both people and businesses thrive.
