The role of finance
Traditionally, finance is responsible for managing the business’s costs and improving productivity. As the role and mandate of finance is expanding, finance is increasingly expected to drive the digital strategy – refer to our first emerging themes report on the Changing role and mandate of finance for more insights.
There was a time when all eyes were on IT when it came to any technological or data needs, especially when installing the right infrastructure or automating processes. Finance has previously been viewed as a facilitator with IT leading and managing the process. However, our research is showing that finance has a bigger role to play in infrastructure adaptation, automation, and data. They should be not just a facilitator but rather a driver in the process based on their overall knowledge and understanding of the business.
Finance should partner with IT. As finance professionals understand the needs of stakeholders within the business, they are in the best position to outline what is needed for IT to create an effective and efficient structure. Finance professionals are in-house consultants who collaborate with other functions to understand their workings and end-to-end procedures, discover where both problems and opportunities exist, identify where processes can be improved, and ultimately find solutions.
Finance professionals are also data translators. Many of the systems are nonfinance owned, but, while the stakeholders have access to these systems, they often don’t understand what the numbers are telling them. This is where finance comes in to help understand the stories behind the numbers and how they affect the organisation’s health. Overall, finance is a central partner that connects the needs of the business.
Organisations that are further along the journey explained that it starts with an organisational vision, with digital strategies that are supported by the senior executive team. Having a digital roadmap facilitated by finance depicts a clearer understanding of what needs to be achieved and how it is going to be achieved.
Our research reveals that finance has a key role to play in the following areas:
Finance should:
Identify business needs of the various functions that will be supported by the infrastructure
Identify appropriate infrastructure with connected capabilities
Ensure connected capabilities within the infrastructure ecosystem
Assess infrastructure investments and provide appropriate documentation to justify them
Collaborate with IT to manage risks and meet compliance demands
Ensure accountability is established and understood by the appropriate business units
Help manage digital transformation initiatives
Understand the benefits of automation
Identify the opportunities for automation
Be design architects to take a lead role in scoping the requirements
Ensure adequate internal controls are in place to ensure data quality
Apply critical judgement to the outputs produced
If the automation fails, understand what should have been produced, where it went wrong, the root cause of the error, whether this is an exception, and how this can be addressed so it is no longer an exception
Uncover patterns, trends, and predictive insights from both financial and nonfinancial data
Collaborate with IT and data teams to ensure data quality and security
Collaborate with other business owners to ensure that the data is accurate and reliable
Train other business owners and stakeholders to understand and derive value in the data
Collaborate with other internal disciplines (for example data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers) for more comprehensive and insightful analysis and decision-making
Leverage analytics techniques such as data mining, machine learning, and predictive modelling to dissect and translate the data
Use data visualisation tools to drive insights by presenting the data in a user-friendly way
