Ebook Integrating the Finance organisation for global business: important implications for CIOs
In the rapidly changing global market place, where companies have the freedom to choose how and where business gets done, CFOs are under increasing pressure to help achieve profitable growth. To succeed, the Finance organisation has to be extremely agile, adapting to ever-changing corporate priorities and aggressively capturing and transforming data into unique insights while delivering earnings reliability and precision forecasting.
The Global CFO Study 2008, conducted by IBM in cooperation with The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Economist Intelligence Unit, examined CFOs’ current priorities and the obstacles they face in helping the business succeed as a global enterprise. The study found a majority of CFOs looking to help their companies take advantage of the enormous opportunities made possible by the global economy but feeling unable to do so. Their Finance organisations simply lack the flexibility and enterprise-wide integration necessary to mobilise information and resources quickly enough.
The Global CFO Study found that companies whose Finance organisations can act quickly are seeing notably better financial performance than their industry peers. These Finance organisations have taken steps to mandate global standards to drive process and data commonality, which, in turn, has unified geographically dispersed Finance units and enabled new insights and better decision-making through integrated views of information. They have consolidated and simplified their systems and many have taken advantage of delivery models to help maintain standards, lower their costs and redirect their resources to analytical activities that drive value for the business. Such actions are rendering these companies more effective financially and operationally, especially with regard to risk management.
Few of these transformative changes would be possible without information technology (IT). As resident technology chief, the CIO can partner with the Finance organisation to break down individually maintained silos of information and help Finance gain the enterprise-wide visibility, analytical acuity and near real-time reporting and performance metrics that are essential for global business leadership. Such collaboration makes the IFO possible.
This paper looks at the growing alignment between the financial and technical disciplines. It examines the results of the Global CFO Study 2008 in the context of IT, identifying the critical implications for CIOs and the need for a strategic partnership with CFOs and more ongoing collaboration between Finance and IT.
Contents
Introduction
Globalisation and the
impact on CFOs
Integration is the answer
Managing risk to improve financial performance
Helping Finance integrate
Working in partnership with Finance
Conclusion
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