I was digging through my reading pile and found this about nine-month-old report by Accenture and Oracle entitled The CFO as Corporate Strategist by Donniel Schulman and David Axson of Accenture. Those who follow Host Analytics might remember David Axson as he’s spoken at several of our user conferences. (Note: the 2015 conference is May 18-21 — save the date!)
The overall theme of the paper is that the traditional “bean counter” positioning of CFOs is as outdated as the hula hoop, with CFOs becoming more strategic over time, and partnering with the CEO to run the company.
Here’s one chart from the report that shows just that:
We definitely seeing this trend with our customers at Host Analytics.
As I’ve always said, “CEOs live in the future,” so if CFOs want to partner with them, they are going to de-emphasize a lot of their backwards-looking role and join their CEOs in the future. This means automating and delegating backwards-looking functions like consolidations and reporting. And it means getting more involved with both financial planning & analysis (FP&A) and their cousins in the various “ops” teams springing up around the organization — e.g., salesops — who also do lot of planning, modeling, and scenario building.
