While CFOs have embraced their role as the right hand of the CEO, our latest research confirms the importance of an emerging role: architects of business value. With visibility and access to data and analytics across the enterprise, leading CFOs collaborate across the C-suite to understand risk and levers of growth.
Our research notes the five most effective levers to overcome barriers to strategic change:
- Visibility of the whole enterprise
- Analytics and access to data across the enterprise
- Understanding of enterprise risk
- Strong working relationships with entire C-suite
- Financial authority (assessing the economic basis of investment decisions)
CFOs also have the opportunity to look across functional areas to understand how to create customer value. They can suggest ways to bring cross-functional stakeholders together regularly and use technology to drive end-to-end insights.
For example, they could connect cloud-based solutions to production enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other systems to ingest data and visualize value chains. And they can make the most of real-time data to eliminate friction and errors in processes.
Many CFOs are already trying to gain insights to expand the influence of the finance function.