What is your digital future?

From our work with high growth organisations, we’re seeing an emphasis on accelerated growth while maintaining a lean finance team. But with a lean team of highly valuable individuals, many of whom often wear more than one hat, technology needs to be used as a lever to ensure their skills are producing results that drive the business forward.

We are seeing CFOs taking centre stage. Technology adoption is central to this and finance leaders that are ‘connected’, both to systems and the whole organisation, are able to outmanoeuvre the competition. Think of your company as a rally car. If the CEO is at the wheel, the CFO is the co-driver. Plotting the course, identifying hazards and reaching checkpoints with incredible speed and agility.

Almost all the talk at the moment surrounding the future of work is focussed on one thing – AI. This new technological breakthrough is rapidly evolving the way in which we can work and has the potential to massively improve productivity.

Operationally, AI and machine learning are eliminating repetitive tasks. This elevates teams from admin duties, allowing them to focus on value-add activities. This can have a dramatic impact on team morale and overall business performance. An example is the effect of automation in reducing close times. Teams with shorter or continual close processes can tell accurate stories using real-time data. Reliable and current data also brings opportunities to create predictive analytical models which reduce risk, help anticipate future trends, and can get you ahead of the competition.

Integrated systems are enabling more accurate insights from combined datasets and allow you to slice things up by department, by market segment or revenue stream. This means that skilled finance teams can use this capability to translate complicated and technical financial information into compelling insights that can be easily understood and actioned on by non-finance team members.

While the term ‘digital future’, might sound daunting and sci-fi, there’s no need to be intimidated. In reality, a lot of these technologies are available, easier to implement than you might think, and already being used by progressive teams. Yes, we need to be leveraging every available skill within the team, but we also need to be considerate of work-life balance, and levels of enjoyment, too. Either way, we think there’s an exciting digital future ahead of us.