Making the CFO Shine

In an ever increasing number of organizations, IT management either reports up through the CFO or dual reports to the CFO and CEO. If you have an understanding the pain points your CFO has and can provide them an advantage, not only do you look good, but the CFO shines.

CFOs are under ever increasing pressure to provide financial insights in fast churning markets in shorter and shorter turn around times. In a report co-sponsored by Oracle, Robert Landon points out that the CFOs who are not overwhelmed are in many cases succeeding by following these 3 pillars:

“a new, agile operating model encompassing three pillars:

1. Greater efficiency through automation
2. Better information to predict the future
3. More influence to drive business outcomes”

We will not try to tackle all of these at once, let’s just try to wrap our brains around the easiest first: “More influence to drive business outcomes”.

When the CFO can report on financials- past, present and anticipated in a manner that aligns to the Business P/L or revenue lines, the information is having an impact on the business outcome.

Too often the information that is presented to them by IT is all about infrastructure costs, application development and maintenance, and/or special project costs. Given those inputs, the CFO team has to do a lot of translation, hand waving and added work to make you report useful to the their discussions with the business.

When you can present budgets and costs aligned to Business Services, the CFO can directly take your outputs and leverage the information in business discussions. This not only saves the CFO team added work, the increased transparency to the business removes rounds of questions/answer, the perception of unfair allocations and a misunderstanding of the value IT is bringing to the organization.

What analytics have you added that made your team a CFO Hero?