In advancing their visibility of the business, many CFOs collaborated more closely with IT, sales, marketing, production, and other business groups than they were used to. Such efforts become more difficult and liable to misjudgments when companies use multiple, disparate data sources, don’t have a standard practice for considering all data that matters, or rely on data of inferior quality.
In those situations, CFOs may have to approach visibility by means of technology modernization, finding ways to connect data sources for consolidated reporting and working with IT and business stakeholders to elevate data quality. As only 32 percent of surveyed executives state that they are completely confident in their company’s data,9 many companies and their CFOs could likely benefit from a well-planned and -executed data cleansing and quality initiative.
When important customer, market, and supplier data reside not just in the ERP and CRM systems, but also in email, ecommerce systems, social media, and a variety of other business tools, it can take deep expertise to create integrations and provide CFOs and other executives with dashboards and reporting mechanisms that make sense of an organization’s data environment. Ideally, technical experts who also understand business needs should perform these integrations and make certain that they align with the data and decision needs of CFOs and others.