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A new research report released today by CFO Research and sponsored by SAP shows that while Finance has improved a lot over the past years, there is plenty of opportunity to Finance to deliver more value to the organization.

The report, Thriving in the Digital Economy: Four Reasons Why Finance Is Excited About the Future has four key findings that CFOs, senior finance executives and board members will find of significant interest:

Finance professionals are embracing their influence in their enterprises—and looking forward to a bright future as their profession evolves.

The good news is that finance professionals are more influential than ever in their organization, and have opportunities to go beyond core traditional areas of ‘old’ finance. The biggest challenge with this opportunity comes from ensuring that talent with leadership potential in finance can grow beyond the core additional areas.

The organizational scope of the finance function—already broad— continues to expand to encompass risk management, IT, M&A, and other key functions.

Again, as Finance becomes the central organizational address for all administrative and support functions within an organization, can the talent planning match this need?

Finance teams will be challenged to fulfill their core performance management mandate in the face of rapid change and greater business complexity.

High value-add within finance can only happen with the right people, processes and technologies in place, especially as business gets more complex and change continues at a faster pace.

Finance professionals see the rising wave of digitalization and automation as the key to their ability to partner with the business to manage performance.

In a conversation with Thack Brown, general manager and global head of Line-of-Business Finance at SAP, he said that the impact of technology opportunities (digitization and automation) will radically change how the transactional part of finance is being managed, even by those following current best practices.

Stay tuned as I will be sharing parts of my interview with Thack Brown. The insights he offered were fascinating, and combined with this report, provides excellent food for thought for the CFO who is looking to be the best business partner possible to their organization.

Anyone reading news in the past year has come across the words IoT (or Internet of Things). As senior finance leader in your organization, this trend has an impact on you, your peers, and your organization.

The question you may have asked yourself but were not confident enough to ask others was “So What?”

My colleagues Jim McFadzean and Andrew Lane at Stanton Chase recently released a whitepaper called: The Internet of Things: Adapting Corporate Structure to Reflect the Connectivity of IoT.

This whitepaper allows you to learn more about what IoT is all about, and the impact it has on the CFO as well as the organization.

In this 11 page report, McFadzean and Lane discuss the impact of IoT on the C-Suite. Here is what they report on the impact on the Chief Financial Officer:

Bruce MacLean, CFO at Infomart Data Centers, already finds the Internet of Things to be integral in his daily management. “Our accounting, payroll, HR, phone systems – all of our administrative and financial functions are connected and supported via the Internet.”

The CFO will need to adopt an offensive approach in order to keep finance and accounting information secure in the age of the Internet of Things. The data acquired via an organization’s internet-enabled devices will be new, limitless, and contextually raw. Such a wealth of information has the potential to be reconfigured and mined for trends that offer insight into an organization’s business activities, be it customer purchasing habits, production information, or shipping histories. The CFO will need to work closely with the CIO and CSO to insure the security not just of financial records, but of any data that could be used by an unscrupulous third party to gain an understanding of an organization’s dealings.

CFOs:

Are you aware of the impact that IoT will have on the future of your career and your organization?
What will you be doing about it?

Good news CFOs: The Future of Finance Looks Bright (But Only if you Plan and Act)

CFOs: How the IoT (Internet of Things) Impacts You and Your Organization

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