Januar 7, 2017 M. Weber

CFOs’ Top Goals for 2017 – ANALYTICS

Sean Alocca published the “CFOs’ Top Goals for 2017” article at cfo.com (pls. see the link below).

ANALYTICS as a result of the survey

According to a survey held by Kaufmann Hall, ANALYTICS is the CFO number one goal in 2017. Surveys message is “do more with the financial and operations data”. Therefore CFOs want to “move from consolidation finance to access data across the company”.

Spreadsheets are all around

One of the causes is driven by the fact that many finance departments using Spread-Sheets for budgeting, reconciliation etc.. While doing so the whole process is running with decreased efficiency, poor effectiveness and the underlying risk of simply having
– numbers that are not running against the P&L,
– spending tons of hours with updating,
– copy and paste issues/broken cell-calculation-links etc.

ad-hoc analysis and IT-resources

So called ad-hoc (non-standard) analysis requirements describing another issue. Missing valuable access to relevant data is blocking the ability to solve those issues. On the other end CFOs seeing agility as an option to satisfy ad-hoc requirements. In those situations spreadsheets fairly looking like helping out – often to the sake of data-integrity.

In addition the survey indicates another well-known problem, the limited IT resources. Departments using spreadsheets to compensate sufficient applications support and state-of-the-practice IT knowledge.

 

Please find the link to the article below.

http://ww2.cfo.com/analytics/2016/11/cfos-top-goal-2017-b