As a company, you have to be smarter than your competition in order to win. Depending on your company goals, winning could mean: gaining market share, improving margins or to increase revenue.

For centuries chess was a human-only game. Garry Kasparov became the youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985 at age 22. For years he held the world title. In May 1997 he became the first world champion to lose a match to a computer.

Given the rate of technological change even the best humans can be defeated. No industry is exempt: all industries can expect a game-changing experience. Things that seemed really far out there just a couple of years or even a month ago, will have a massive impact on how we re-assess every part of our business. Research of McKinsey shows that current technology can fully automate 42% of finance activities and almost entirely automate an additional 19 percent!

Make your move

When technology can do a specific task better & faster, you shouldn’t teach people to run that task. Instead, empower people and think ahead to meet shareholder expectations, such as “How can you address strategic goals like improve margins, decision making, and reducing risk?”

Many organisations are still spending the majority of their resources just keeping the lights on. A classic example is ‘we run the business this way for many years, so we do not have to change’. This is understandable as a move to a newer version of a financial system is not easy when you run a legacy system. However, with the speed of innovation, the gap between businesses that embrace innovation and those who do not is widening every single day.

It is not about the move itself, only about the timing as the move to a new system will in due time be unavoidable. In general, you have 2 flavours today:

Applications that come with full service (SaaS), so you always gain from the latest developments.
A legacy application that you can run yourself or via a hosted service.

Isn’t it quite obvious to go for number 1 as you don’t want to face a widening innovation gap again?

How RPA, AI, and ML impact your business

A few of the latest developments are robot process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Operational processes like capturing and processing all the transactions can run without human interventions. So you are able to free up time for value added tasks while technology ensures the reduction of human error as it autonomously unveils insights by creating reports and dashboards based on real-time data.

Implementing modern technology goes beyond refreshing systems as it is a strategic building block. It is similar to chess: think a few steps ahead to outperform your competitors. By being more operationally efficient, the finance team could drive and realize new implicit business models. Even driving the strategic agenda with unbiased intelligence! And this applies to not only the finance team, but also across the whole business. By fostering better interactions through technology, companies can connect segments up to now in isolation.

Innovations, like RPA, AI/ML, were not common years ago, but are available today. Personally, I think technology minded CFO’s will benefit the most from the digital age. They just get it!

How finance and IT can cooperate

The CFO cannot drive digital enablement on her/his own. Buy-in from the CIO is required. However, as I just mentioned the majority of IT resources is still on the maintenance side. An important mindshift on the side of the IT department has to take place: Less focus at infrastructure and more focus to support business innovation by embracing the latest technologies.

In a changing world, technology is driving change in the way we do business faster than ever before. Companies that focus on old technologies or stick with the status quo will fall behind. As the value of autonomous systems increase, the C-suite has to take ownership: Use technology as an enabler and prepare your workforce as modern technology will definitely impact the required skills of your workforce.

Digital transformation

According to Gartner, the most disruptive change in the history of IT is imminent. Several years ago, Apple revolutionized the world with the iPhone transforming the phone to a simple, easy-to-use communication device. iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication that has never before been seen in a mobile device.

In order to increase customer satisfaction, a key focus area of many organizations is adopting a forward-looking view of expense management and the effective use of resources. How do you ensure your employees and IT gain a competitive advantage? If you have been running a successful business for many years, is changing your business necessarily a good idea?

Technology works for you

Similarly to the transformation of the iPhone, it is critical to shift your finance department’s strategy from being reactive to acting as a strategic internal business partner. This shift can be made by adopting innovative technology and attracting highly qualified employees to improve internal processes.

It is no surprise that technology is slowly replacing humans. Executing in a consequent way is possible when organization are seeking for process improvement via workflow automation. Taking advantage of this powerful capability allows organization for reallocation of resources to focus on strategy.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
- SOCRATES

The dual combination of robust technology and highly effective employees results in enhanced processes and expense saves. This becomes even more crucial as a result of the financial crisis.

This means real-time delivery of information, so you are able to make the best decisions for your organization. Technology enables 24/7 availability and accessibility which is now the standard.

If you can’t see without glasses, you should wear them

The volume of data flow is getting bigger and more complex. Big data is the new form of capital – like money, data has value. It’s a must have for organizations to deliver new products, services and ways of doing business. E.g. social media and the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT).

The timely delivery of correct information, by the correct person, in the correct format is key to organizations in order to create meaningful analysis and make the right business decisions. Each employee makes decisions everyday - collecting, filtering and sharing the data with the whole organization enables more effective decision-making across the company. Access to BI and analytics provides insights to further enhance these processes.

Start improving information leadership and vision

Corporate boardrooms will start talking about data capital, not big data anymore. Human beings, supported by IT, are getting smarter. A key success factor in the constantly evolving society is the availability of strategy-focused employees. The current business requires a motivated organization to make proper decisions within the right time frame.

The volume of data flow is getting bigger and more complex. Are you as organization able to make the right decisions?

Increase productivity and be more profitable

Avoid gaps in the information data flow. Previously, information was either unavailable or difficult to obtain. By deploying Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), in combination with the right qualified employees, you're able to be successful as an organization in the rapidly changing environment. Many organizations have already invested in software, however, this configuration often does not reflect the current market demands. It works just fine, ‘we have been working for years like this’, is not a valid reason to continue on in the same manner. If you are aware of the changing environment and you ignore this by not being open to change, it could be fatal for the organization. It is all about the mindshift.

Oracle’s ERP vision is to deliver accelerated productivity to the finance team, serve business managers with streamlined processes, and provide all users with on-demand access to role-based information:

Operational excellence to have one single source of truth
Proactively resolve issues to expedite automated processing
Reduce transaction processing costs and data entry errors

From governance to guidance

To cross your t’s and dot your i’s, you need more then only the numerical understanding of the past period. Being able to make prognosis is as well essential. By deploying Enterprise Performance Planning (EPM) you are enabling the organization to use the past to interpenetrate the future in order to respond quickly in a rapidly changing environment.

Oracle’s EPM vision is to provide finance leaders with a new guidance system for organizations.

One that helps you engineering predictable performance by predicting future outcomes and having confidence in your close processes.
One that is responsive to change allowing you to choose the way you work.
One that helps you connect the enterprise and create a culture of accountability by providing visibility into past performance and clarity about the strategic goals.

You often hear that people are busy. Being busy can’t be an excuse for not being open to what happens in and around the company. apparently there were too busy as well at Nokia and look where that has led.

Everything is changing, except the change by itselves. Is your company prepared?

Empowering modern finance!

Original post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-change-future-your-business-richard-harsevoort-

Business is like chess - you need to think ahead to win!