CFOs need to renovate their enterprise performance management methods to better-assist CEOs.
If organisations are to accelerate back toward and beyond pre-2020 ambitions, CFOs will need to renovate their enterprise performance management methods to better-assist CEOs dealing with the rolls of thunder that come down from the board.
Savvy CFOs Find the Glass Ceiling & Break It
Firstly: By helping CEOs reduce ‘corporate antibodies’ against the change and innovation necessary for iron-clad enterprise performance management.
Secondly: By optimising (and partially automating) financial risk management, financial planning and financial reporting.
In the long run CFOs help CEOs ensure they still have a business to run in 10 years.
CFOs able to put powerful new truths on CEOs’ radar will champion the kind of crisis resilience and growth forecasting that ensures both still have jobs down the road.
Savvy CFOs Are Fluent In ‘Matrix’
CEOs need to stay focused on steering operations in the general direction of strategic goals. This is why CFOs need to provide the six business sense missing from the CEOs decision-making anatomy.
This requires CFOs to become the CEO’s savant to intuit big-picture insight from the matrix of financial information at their disposal.
In other words, CFOs need to be able to read between the lines like nobody else can.
What if CFOs are blinded by a lack of financial scope?
For finance executives to draw powerful financial insight capable of broadening the scope of leaders’ decision-making capacity, they need to do the following things.
Find & Access Your Data-Warehouse
In 1988 IBMs Paul T. Murphy and Barry A. Devlin wrote a pioneering paper that led to the birth of data warehousing.
Responding to emerging challenges of scale in the late 80s, Murphy and Barry correctly identified that: “...an architecture is needed to draw together the various strands of informational system activity within the company.”
In the 80s data warehousing was just an emerging innovation. Today it’s an essential tool that helps CFOs and CEOs to:
- build a financial data narrative from endless moving parts
- fight ‘corporate antibodies’ to change with evidence-based approaches
- enrich business performance management potential
- research financial opportunity otherwise out of sight
by drawing together financially practical insights from disparate financial data sets scattered across different parts of a business’s makeup.
Build One Source of Cloud EPM Data Truth
One of the challenges both CFOs and CEOs face is unifying the departmental and corporate vision under a single factual narrative.
‘Performance’ means different things to different departments.
That's why CEOs can sometimes face friction (even hostility) when implementing business change aimed at fixing performance pinch points.
In this context CFOs have an opportunity (and responsibility) to build one source of enterprise performance management truth that helps CEOs.
- Sell in a single unified financial picture to the entire organisation
- Gain stakeholder buy-in with evidence-based insight
- Build a culture of visibility and collaboration across departments
- Minimise manual intervention of financial operations
CFOs willing to adopt a cloud-first approach to enterprise performance management gain agility in serving deep financial data to CEOs as it’s generated.
Better still, executives and stakeholders have anytime anywhere access. The result is a multi-stakeholder approach to optimised enterprise performance management and crisis resilience.
