Today’s CFOs and their teams have their work cut out for them. As digital transformation drives major changes in traditional business and operating models, and macroeconomic and regulatory uncertainty become the new normal, organizations need strategic counsel from their finance team now more than ever. But while the data required to make informed strategic recommendations is within reach, it’s often trapped inside of data silos. Worse yet, traditional data infrastructure can’t handle the volume of data being generated. As a result, finance teams struggle to keep up with closing the books and performing other basic activities.
How can you run lean and focus on strategically advising the business when your team is pouring so much energy into extracting basic insights from data? You can’t. What’s needed is a fundamentally new approach.
In our latest eBook, Data and the Modern CFO: What You Need to Know to Lead with Analytics, we explore the key hurdles that prevent CFOs from performing the strategic and data-driven decision making their organization needs—and how to overcome them. Here’s a preview:
Hurdle #1: You Lack Visibility Across Organizational Data
On the one hand, today’s CFOs and their teams have access to more data than ever before. Organizations are now capturing financially-relevant data across every function, from marketing and sales to operations, customer support, and everything in between. But the systems that support each department don’t always talk to each other. This makes capturing a holistic view extremely difficult, and often costly.
But advances in data technology are now changing the game. No longer forced to allocate vast resources gathering the data required to close the books and meet the other basic functions of finance, CFOs and their teams can run lean and focus on what matters most: strategically advising the business.
Hurdle #2: You Are Unable to Make High-Quality Decisions Fast Enough
Think about the data workflows your team must work around today. If your data infrastructure has you running data transformations and queries overnight, something needs to change. You can’t operate at mainframe-era speeds and expect to keep up with the business. The volume of data flowing into the organization is too great and the demands on your team are too high.
From closing the books to making strategic business decisions, every moment you spend wrestling with data to get the insights your team needs is a missed opportunity. Keeping up requires a data platform that delivers speed on three key fronts: It’s up and running fast, can handle an endless variety of queries without involving IT, and it delivers insights in subseconds instead of hours.
Hurdle #3: Your Technology is Boxing You Into a Corner
Nothing is more expensive than foundational technology that doesn’t age well—especially when it comes to data and analytics. Data is at the very heart of your business and the system(s) that power it underpin every layer of your IT stack. The costs of technical obsolescence and misapplication, therefore, can have a major impact on your ability to achieve peak business performance.
What’s needed is a base-layer data platform like Incorta that overcomes the limitations of traditional data infrastructure and embraces the constantly-shifting nature of business and technology. Whereas previous systems were built as workarounds to decades-old limitations in computational power, network complexity and data storage, Incorta takes advantage of remarkable advances in each of these areas to solve the underlying problems that have long plagued data analytics in the enterprise.
Ready to learn more? Download your copy of Data and the Modern CFO: What You Need to Know to Lead with Analytics today.