This report has a whole range of fascinating insights. The central theme is that CFO/Finance Directors are uniquely positioned to assist organisations as ‘digital guardians’, using finance and related data to increase revenue. Our experience at Cloud Doing Good shows that growth and the use of data in a modern cloud finance system can apply significant growth in the commercial sector.
The evolution of the role of Finance reflects an increasing level of automation in the traditional role of finance in recording of transactions. There is a shift towards finance being a central player in the use of data 'forward looking' in a much broader organisational context.
In some ways, everything changes and nothing changes. 25 years ago, ‘knowledge management’ was the in-thing. And a desire to evolve from data, through information to knowledge. The terminology may have changed (nowadays using terms such as ‘AI’, ‘machine learning’, ‘Big Data’), the tools may be far more sophisticated, but the similarities are retained.
However, there is one difference now to 25 years ago. 25 years ago, there was significant IT infrastructure build and maintenance needed. The explosion of powerful cloud computing has ushered in era of ‘adopt not adopt’, enabling organisations of all sizes to buy at costs that would have been unheard.
For example, our experience includes seeing the change from the multi-year, multi-million projects needed 25 years ago. Today, the same segmentation and multi country reporting could be introduced for a charity in a matter of weeks, not years.
In summary, the concept is a simple one: reduce the amount of time on data entry and ‘build’ of reporting to spend more time on creating value across the organisation, based on finance data. With an increased focus on forward forecasting. In short, finance transformation allowing finance leaders to play a greater role in driving organisational revenue.
The Accenture report is available on their website: