In a recent survey of European Chief Financial Officers, respondents generally agreed that their company’s future success will increasingly depend on making better use of technology to manage their business data. The four key factors cited were:

Adapting – being able to adapt to the rapid pace of change and greater business complexity.

Access – have instantaneous access to a unified, comprehensive and up to date set of financial and operational data.

Translation – being able to translate the business knowledge from the systems into swift and decisive action.

Big Data – having the capability to introduce lots of information into the business systems in a clear and concise manner that can be easily processed.

In our opinion, this is nothing new. Finance and IT have been trying to address all of these issues since the 1980’s, going from punch cards data input to direct access, paper printouts to terminal displays and so on.

More and more the influencing departments are relying on IT to support and supplement their decisions. With this, IT systems must be bought up to the consumer IT standards – smart phone compatible, fast and easy to use. When these systems start acting as the bedrock of automation for accounting, compliance, transaction-processing and reporting activities, the influencing departments themselves can have significantly more time available for higher value work.

Finance Officers see the world being digitised and automated and they need to transform…not only to keep up, but to be ahead of the current pace. As a department, they need to work with IT to ensure that they get the ‘Most out of Technology’.

If you require a roadmap on how to get your technology to where you believe it needs to be then please get in touch.