A new modern finance delivery model is emerging, equipped for high performance and success in the digital age. Modern finance teams have fully embraced a new operating model for finance that is responsive and change-ready, embracing digital technologies to proactively automate traditional transactional work, while investing in new skill sets to provide the analytical insights and strategic guidance management needs to adopt new digital business models and ways of working. In this report, we reveal what exemplifies these high-performing teams: what sets them apart from their traditional peers, what benefits they bring to their organizations, and what attributes others can grasp and replicate for their own advantage.
“Agile Finance Revealed: The New Operating Model for Modern Finance” contains the blueprint for the new operating model for modern finance. It shows what organizations can expect to gain from this fast-evolving and highly-effective source of competitive advantage.
Enabling Business Agility
Everybody agrees that organizations need to be agile in the digital age. But how can finance professionals adapt and survive when new digital technologies are threatening the future of knowledge work? And what does finance have to do to remain relevant, to empower the CFO, and to enable a business to become agile? In our efforts to find answers to these questions, we’ve identified a new operating model for modern finance consisting of the following attributes that enable CFOs and their teams to drive greater business agility:
- Cross-functional, integrated teams that are centralized in shared services or centers of excellence. Empowered by cloud and digital technologies like robotic process automation and machine learning, the ever-improving accounting services and efficiency delivered by these teams are driving highly significant business improvement.
- The ability to unleash the full potential in big data analytics and artificial intelligence. Doing so stretches the Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) role beyond recognition, into a powerhouse that generates the insights organizations need to develop innovative strategies and achieve performance levels that eclipse the competition.
- New skill sets in statistics, data analysis, data visualization, and business partnering, to support rapid decision making and performance management.While it is important to have people with strong commercial awareness, you cannot replace all the hardcore data scientists and data analysts with training in statistics who are the true data masters.