The Role of Analytics for the CFO: a #CFOexchange session

The role of analytics has become increasingly important to the Chief Financial Officer, as they seek to remain informed and competitive in the digital age.

In this session of the #CFOexchange, we sat down with an all-star crew to discuss the importance, and value, of analytics to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as they grapple with an increasingly competitive market and a wealth of new and emerging tools to help them decipher the market, their internal performance, and the data (and insights) needed to make strong, performance-oriented business decisions.

Joining us for this session were:

– Gary Walker, Senior Director of Global Shared Services, Finance, Molson-Coors,
– Thomas Dobis, Offering Lead for F&A Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
– Charles Sutherland, Chief Research Officer, HfS Research
– Fred McClimans, Managing Director Digital Trust & Security, HfS Research

A few key themes from our conversation:

Defining “Analytics”: Analytics is about the utilization of operational and performance data to inform and lead business insights… the challenge is in getting the right people and data together. This includes the algorithmic aspects as well as the process of creating and leveraging insights.

On what isn’t included in Analytics: There’s a tendency to think of straight-forward performance data, but that’s not analytics if it doesn’t drive insights. Business Intelligence (BI) tools often provide rich data, but data without actionable intelligence doesn’t automatically qualify as analytics. True analytics drive revenue growth, cost reductions, pricing, and new growth opportunities.

On the importance of Analytics: Data analytics can lead to great insights, particularly for planning and modeling, across all business units. Key is in properly tagging all the data and indexing it to leverage the right tools to access, consolidate, and analyze in as close to real-time as possible.

On the evolving use of analytics: There’s an on-going battle between the move to drive to standardization and the increased value of custom analytics for immediate or increased value. The use of analytics – including the use of IoT data – can be important in understanding drivers behind future consumer demand (which impacts operational planning and strategy). The amount of information accessible today has doubled or tripled recently, and it’s getting more insightful – especially regarding risk.

On the value of analytics for risk management: Operational experience can be leveraged into lessons learned, but businesses need to be careful about aggressive implementation. There are core fundamental and baseline data management items that need to be understood and implemented prior to aggressive use of analytics data, particularly to avoid risks such as scope creep during implementations – governance is key to successful analytics implementations.