Something to Consider October 2019 1

Finance Is Going Digital – So How Come IT Spending Is Going Down? 

The Hackett Group’s research reveals that actual technology spend has been consistently declining since 2009. Yet we know that finance executives are putting greater emphasis on digital transformation and increasing the adoption levels of new tools.

According to recent data, world-class finance organizations’ IT spend has dropped by 27% over the past decade.

This is not because finance is failing to invest. Rather, these results reflect the digital progress of leading CFOs and CIOs. A lot has changed since the days of fragmented heavy ERP systems with long winded implementations.

The upshot is that running and investing in technology today SHOULD BE a lot cheaper than it used to be (although there are many reasons why this may not be as evident as it should be), while at the same time automation is greatly improving finance’s capabilities.

The savings from greater automation have been redirected to funding value-creating activities. From reducing technology cost to freeing up staff from routine work, and enabling companies to redeploy finance resources.

Savings in core technology are funding new initiatives and CIOs and CFOs are working hard in the drive to simplicity, which results in fewer duplicated applications, fewer ERP instances, and the application of the mantra “the best automation is elimination”.