Finance Management
What has changed in the CFO Office?
The demands on the CFO and its organization have changed strongly in the past years. Even if the focus of the CFO office has changed from the correct recording of transactions to business partners over the last 20 years, this has largely been based on a stable foundation of methods and instruments.
On the one hand, the complexity of the existing business has significantly increased through a more global, clearly more work-oriented line-up. In addition, business models are changing more rapidly and new business models are created, which still do not affect the still important intuition for the business.
These evolving business models must be evaluated quickly and with a combination of conventional and newly developed custom instruments. Market data plays a much more significant role, and customers and products are increasingly generating data that creates value in itself, or which is needed for service delivery or billing in a respective business model.
Finally, the technological possibilities in the CFO Office have opened significantly. Both on the classic legacy system side, as well as in reporting and planning, faster databases (in-memory technologies, such as HANA S4) and the growing interlinking of companies provide massive opportunities for productivity gains in the CFO office. The expectation of the CFO was, and is, that he has the company figures under control and brings transparency and clarity in decision-making.
The CFO provides the copass, guiding the company safely through complexity, disruption and transformation.
The roles change very clearly in the CFO Office. Instead of a controller, compiling figures and reports, data analysts and statisticians will be required in the future carrying out the necessary analysis of data generated by products, customers and across the supply chain. They in turn are used for service delivery and billing as well as to plan and control operations or to evaluate strategic business opportunities. The target operating model in the CFO Office clearly distinguishes in the future between transactional elements in shared service centers or reporting factories and the analytical elements of a financial advisor and data scientists. This change in the finance sector requires a clear target model and an according roadmap so for its realization.
The maneuverability during the transformation is key for success and remains a clear expectation from management for the CFO.
Our overall experience in the design and analysis of the CFO Office as a whole, in particular in the design of management model and decision-making systems, is the first important building block for a relevant support of the CFO. This experience opens the view for the focus themes and arranges the many influences into a meaningful target model.
The second value contributing factor is the consequent use of generated data assets along the entire chain from legacy to reporting systems. With this experience, we can offer a lasting partnering approach for the CFO on eye-level and a reliable governance throughout the development of a reliable management and decision-making system and an adaptive and sustainable CFO organization.
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Arbeitskreis KoRe, IBM Cognos Controller Roundtable and Online Event IBM Cognos Controller Version 10.3, CCH Tagetik Days
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