CFOs are under greater pressure than ever to provide more strategic direction and help drive efficiency across the business. With existing technology and tools struggling to keep pace with these demands, the urgency for the office of the CFO to transform is growing. But delivering this change is tough – as many as 70% of finance transformations fail, according to Gartner. This is partly because the CFO landscape is getting harder to navigate as the operating backdrop becomes more complex, but also because CFO responsibilities are increasingly expanding.
“One of the big challenges for the CFO office is that it has become critical to business transformation, but it is also critical to transform their own function too,” says Jeremy Ung, chief technology officer at BlackLine. “This is the balancing act that’s ongoing for CFOs – while you’re helping the business transform and fund business transformations, you’re also trying to transform your own CFO organisation.”
This is challenging for CFOs to manage given the myriad tech systems that are feeding data into the CFO’s office from across the business. These tend to be individual systems that do not communicate with each other. And because those systems have often been accumulated over time and heavily customised, it can be difficult to pull data out of them.
Another challenge is that organisations’ tech infrastructure is always evolving, especially in larger enterprises when they acquire new companies and systems grow ever more sprawling, trapping data in multiple silos.
This is problematic because timely access to data isn’t just crucial for managing financial operations and reporting. There is also growing demand for real-time data that feeds other systems across the business to inform strategic decision-making.
On top of this, tech transformation is happening at a much faster clip than in the past, particularly with innovations such as AI, which is piling pressure on the CFO’s office to fund this transformation.
“The business imperative is if you don’t fund this transformation and if you don’t keep ahead of this, you risk being disrupted, you risk being displaced and you risk losing your competitive edge,” Ung says.
The transformation journey
To begin this journey and ensure transformation success, CFOs need a clear strategy and a vision in place – what BlackLine calls a future-ready approach to financial operations. This means having accurate data, efficient processes and intelligent insights. To achieve this, leaders must embrace technology and understand the impact AI is going to have on the business, then set the course for that destination with well-defined expectations and milestones. “There’s a need to modify how you operate and to think about what that future good state looks like,” says Ung.
A key first step is ensuring that the underlying data flowing into processes and AI tools can be trusted and validated. Strong data foundations are the cornerstone of successful digital transformation, and BlackLine’s solutions can help organisations get their house in order.
The tools, the processes and the vision of the organisation are also going to change as part of a future-ready digital transformation project. Therefore, it is essential to partner with stakeholders firm-wide to ensure that vision is aligned and everyone is striving towards the same shared goals.
“Change management is critical,” says Ung. “You need to be able to take along the rest of the organisation and understand where you need to mutually go, so this is why you see a deeper collaboration between CIOs and CTOs and CFOs; everyone is much more deeply involved with transformation now.”
As well as the people and process combo, getting the right technology is key to delivering a successful transformation so that finance teams can become more efficient, increase accuracy, reduce risks and deliver data-driven insights. This typically means adopting a centralised platform that can bring data together from disparate systems.
“We want to be that nexus for data within the office of the CFO, and to control that flow of data and orchestrate and automate it,” says Ung. “This allows CFOs to respond more quickly to serving those transformation needs.”
Data at scale
To help enable future-ready financial operations, BlackLine recently introduced its Studio360 platform. The Studio360 platform is designed for organisations to incorporate data at scale and use it to enable AI-driven decision-making, visualisation and process automation. BlackLine has partnered with data storage company Snowflake to enhance the platform’s data capabilities.
“Given the disparate landscape of all these different systems, you need all that data in one place to make clear decisions,” says Ung. “That’s what our platform enables and why it’s so critical. Data is at the heart of our platform to drive decision-making in real time, and then on top, to be able to build other decision-making capabilities that can enable businesses to transform.”
This future-ready approach is also about building repeatable processes that are scalable, so systems can grow as business needs evolve. “We have an approach that allows our customers to roll out best practices, templates and workflows that are proven and tested with other customers at scale, and do this repeatedly,” says Ung.
Building the foundations
Businesses are often deterred from embarking on transformation projects because, despite having vast amounts of data, that data can be difficult and expensive to access and make usable. Ung says BlackLine effectively offers a quicker means of unlocking the value of that data with a view to improving its quality over time.
“If it’s messy or if it’s incomplete, it doesn’t matter – we can take that data and augment it,” he says. “You have to start somewhere – no organisation is perfect, but if you let perfection be the enemy of good, you’re never going to get started on your transformation and you’re never going to complete it and reach those successful outcomes.”
By building up this data foundation, CFOs can start moving towards a future-ready CFO office that is highly automated and where AI is empowering decision-making and accelerating workflows.
While there is still a level of hesitation around AI adoption, Ung says there is also optimism about what it can potentially do in the future.
“These two things are in tension right now in the office of the CFO, so it’s critical that we build trust,” says Ung. “Our approach has been about putting our customers in the driver’s seat around AI decision-making. It’s important that people embrace and see what the technology can do, but not feel like it’s going to put them at risk in terms of bad decisions.”
It is also important for CFOs to understand what success looks like to ensure transformation programmes are delivering value and business leaders can see they are getting a return on their investment.
In addition, adopting an interconnected system enables the flow of information to be instantaneous across the business, allowing decisions to be made faster and supporting speedier transformation.
“Having platforms that are interconnected is more agile,” says Ung. “You can iterate more quickly and you can build new solutions on top so as the shape of your business changes or your business needs change, you can actually respond to that.”
Therefore by leaning into a platform that can integrate multiple systems, CFOs can better orchestrate operations, streamline processes, enhance data visualisation and deliver insights to help them meet the growing demands of the CFO’s office while improving overall business performance.
Q&A: Fostering a data foundation for a future-ready finance function, with BlackLine chief technology officer Jeremy Ung
How important is data quality to the success of today’s CFOs?
Data quality is critical, but it can be iterative. You need platforms that help you improve the quality of your data over time, to enhance and augment. Some businesses say they are not ready to adopt a solution because their data is not ready or it is spread across disparate systems. Well, let people help you solve that. BlackLine and our partners have ensured our data platform is designed to allow data to be brought in from disparate systems and then normalise, augment and cleanse that data in our platform, because we understand the data landscape is complex.
What impact can poor-quality data have on business decisions?
There is real financial risk if you’re relying on poor-quality data. One of the things about having systems of record that have trustworthy data is you reduce the amount of risk in your organisation, whether it’s risk to the financials you are reporting or using internally for strategic decisions. There have been well-publicised cases of organisations that had discovered large accounting discrepancies, so having data in one place, and having auditability and control around that is critical. That’s why we’ve built BlackLine; it provides control and traceability over your data. Poor-quality data poses a real risk to your business, not just in terms of being able to fund initiatives to help you transform, but also just in your ability to operate as a trustworthy organisation.
What role can technology play in maintaining data integrity and how can CFOs ensure their tech infrastructure enables reliable results?
BlackLine’s core DNA is about control – it’s at the heart of how we manage data and how we allow for that auditability. There’s also a need to ensure that the data that you’re feeding into these systems is in partnership with other functions in the business and that the CFO is not just trying to do it all on their own. There’s data across the business that has to be fed into these systems, so as long as your platforms are open, flexible and scalable, you can pull in this data and use it to augment your data sets and enhance their quality.
Can you share examples of proven, achievable approaches to data-driven transformation?
Having a platform approach that allows you to build on top is definitely helping organisations realise transformation. By having data in our platform and accessing our AI solutions, we’ve had some customers that have saved 18 hours a day by being able to leverage these capabilities. Others are improving the accuracy of their forecasts because they have all their data in one place. Machine learning models and AI both rely on heavy amounts of data, so the more data you have, the higher the fidelity of forecasts and of AI suggestions and output. Having more data improves accuracy, it helps models spot trends, spot anomalies and identify risks, and so having that all in one place gives you that power.
How can CFOs ensure their transformation programmes are cost-effective?
Time to value is critical when it comes to data. People often get scared off by these transformation projects because of how hard it is to get data. Outside of technology companies, not everyone has a data science or data engineering team, so it can be a daunting investment. That’s why we strategically look to partner with companies like Snowflake, where enterprise data already resides. Pulling it out of that silo is one of the first steps towards enabling rapid transformation.
From a CFO lens, it’s costly to spin up a team that does that. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to have an AI team in the CFO office, and this is where technology providers are really filling that gap by being your technology team. We are an extension of your finance team’s ability to leverage tailor-made AI solutions, using the data that you already have.
For more information please visit blackline.com
