• Flexibility and responsiveness. Cloud deployment allows organizations to bring new locations online quickly, reduces the risk of pursuing new strategies by eliminating the need to invest in additional hardware and staff, and enables companies to scale capacity up or down as needs change. This level of agility is essential to any organization operating in a highly competitive environment, particularly those with international operations or heavy M&A activity. • Improved regulatory compliance. System and process changes required for compliance can be pushed out quickly and all at once to a diverse and geographically distributed organizational footprint. EXTERNAL TECHNOLOGIES CAN BE...
• Flexibility and responsiveness. Cloud deployment
allows organizations to bring new locations online
quickly, reduces the risk of pursuing new strategies
by eliminating the need to invest in additional
hardware and staff, and enables companies to
scale capacity up or down as needs change. This
level of agility is essential to any organization
operating in a highly competitive environment,
particularly those with international operations or
heavy M&A activity.
• Improved regulatory compliance. System and
process changes required for compliance can be
pushed out quickly and all at once to a diverse and
geographically distributed organizational footprint.
EXTERNAL TECHNOLOGIES CAN
BE GAME-CHANGERS
As CIOs work to continually monitor and improve their
internal environments, they should also explore external
technologies that can, quite simply, be game changers.
From integration technologies that increase visibility and
monitoring applications that help minimize risk to
business intelligence solutions that turn information into a
strategic weapon, technology can mean the difference
between a company that thrives and one that lags
behind. The following list includes a few technologies
that are increasingly being deployed by forward-thinking
organizations:
• Analytics and BI. Financial systems contain a
wealth of actionable strategic information, and
advanced analytics can harness this intelligence. BI
is nothing new, but the spectrum of mature
applications and new cutting edge capabilities
(think Big Data) can give financial managers and
the C-Suite unprecedented business insight, much
of it in real-time. According to a 2013 Gartner
study, 70% of high-performing businesses plan to
manage their business processes using real-time
predictive analytics by 2016.3
The CFO as Catalyst for Change: How Finance Can Take the Lead in Business Transformation; Research Report, Accenture,
Longitude Research, Oracle Corp., May 23, 2013
3
• Continuous Monitoring. In this era of rapid
regulatory change and increased oversight, firms
cannot afford to take their eyes off the regulatory
and compliance ball. Monitoring a company’s
transactions and systems for breaches
(unintentional or otherwise) is a job that, for many
organizations, can no longer be managed
effectively using manual means. Continuous
monitoring automates the review of transactions
for anomalies, guards against segregation of duty
violations, and dramatically reduces the time
needed to comply with audit reporting
requirements. The risk of violations and the
workload associated with staying in compliance are
both significantly reduced as a result.
• Mobility. The benefits of anytime, anywhere access
to information are especially crucial to finance.
Mobile capabilities are becoming the norm, as
managers expect to be able to tap into financial
data on their personal devices wherever they are.
Cutting edge financial analysis now relies on
financial managers’ ability to query and analyze
real-time financials on a mobile device 24/7.
CONCLUSION: THE CIO CAN HELP DEFINE
SUCCESS OR FAILURE
Organizational change is inevitable and has a serious
impact on financial systems. How organizations handle it
is becoming the defining difference between success
and failure.
CIOs can differentiate themselves and their departments
by being fully informed about the implications of change
on their finance systems and the options available to
them in their choices of strategies, technologies, and
systems. By adapting configurable, modular and
integrated solutions, they will empower and best serve
their finance teams now and for the foreseeable future.
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