To what extent is your CFO driving Digital Transformation? There are 5 key reasons that they need to be.

Many public companies are struggling to see the investment return from expensive transformation initiatives.

To what extent is your CFO driving Digital Transformation? There are 5 key reasons that they need to be.

Many public companies are struggling to see the investment return from expensive transformation initiatives.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2021! Last year was a bit of a roller coaster, and by the looks of things the ride probably hasn’t finished just yet!

But together, we did learn some great things from 2020 which will help us in the months and years to come.

Executives in every industry know that data is important. Without it, there can be no digital transformation to propel the organization past competitors. There are no analytics driving new sources of revenue. Even running the basic business well isn’t possible. 

We have discussed the trade-off between cost and value for many years and in many of our newsletters. It’s a tricky compromise at the best of times.

After a decade of efficiency gains in most functions, and Finance, IT, Shared Services and GBS are no exceptions, our future is predicated on speed, consumer intimacy and insight, and the integrated end-to-end processes that can deliver on these promises.

Without a doubt, 2020 has been the year of disruption, setting the scene for business for the foreseeable future. We have implemented risk mitigation and business continuity plans we never expected to execute, and many of them worked!

The Global Process Owner…

A senior role that oversees the unification of responsibilities for performance, people, processes, technology and change management. An aspirational role that’s becoming a focal point for continuous improvement and transformation.  

I first met Hiltrud over 12 years ago when she was an Internal Audit leader at BMW. She was already breaking the mould then, with her vision and clear thinking. Now, as the Volkswagen board member for Integrity and Legal Affairs, she is leading the renaissance of the company with a whole new risk management and compliance culture, framework and processes.

“Half of all work tasks will be handled by machines by 2025”. Predictions like these are usually overoptimistic. But this time, we can’t be too sure.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) conducted some interesting research spanning 300 of the world’s biggest companies and their collective eight million employees.

Implementing an effective data and insights strategy. It’s certainly a business goal for most leaders.

However, easier said than done… There is a natural tension between management’s need for rapid response data insights into business processes and operations and the reality of understanding, structuring, cleansing, curating and delivering this data insights capability “as a service”.