Advanced Analytics Give CFOs More Clout
Advanced analytics continues to permeate more functional areas of the enterprise. From marketing campaigns and sales optimization to supply chain and human capital management, business users are deploying newer, easier to use technologies to gain deeper insights, improve decision outcomes at the point of decision, and achieve strategic, financial and risk management objectives.
To ensure that financial and risk management goals are met, CFOs are embracing advanced analytics as well. They are decreasing their reliance on spreadsheets and legacy financial systems. Instead, they are adopting modern tools and applications that facilitate resourcing and monitoring of fund flows to functional areas and return on investment (ROI) of strategic projects.
Advanced analytics also help CFOs adhere with GRC (governance, regulatory, compliance) requirements. At the same time CFOs can also improve the timing and accuracy of financial reporting – and communications – to investors and analysts.
Advanced analytics helps CFOs be more responsive to their various constituencies – both inside and outside of the organization. They can better partner with CIOs to act as enablers to business units by ensuring fast and efficient flow of the company’s two most vital assets: information and cash.
This collaboration drives a virtuous circle: The better the data the CFO and CIO have to work with, the more confidence they will have in their capital allocations. In turn, better investments result in better decision outcomes and operational and financial performance.
Cash can be funneled to those information investments that can not only improve financial ROI, but also the company’s return on data assets (RDA). In digitalization toward the app economy, no two metrics are more critical to the business.
With a stronger understanding of technology initiatives, CFOs can more readily agree on budgets with their CIOs and line of business managers. This ensures better data governance and reins in shadow spending on advanced analytics at the departmental or user level.
Advanced analytics not only provides finance and business teams with a common language to evaluate project funding decisions. It also arms CFOs with their own insights and arguments to measure investment validity and optimize the flow of capital to those that drive both ROI and RDA.
