Harvard Business Review: Finance cannot act as a strategic partner when it is isolated from the rest of the enterprise.

How cloud-based financial planning and analysis systems
are helping companies work faster and smarter

No organization can thrive in a vacuum. Yet at many companies, the finance organization is
asked to do just that. Despite the importance of the finance role and its unrivaled view of the
enterprise, it is often seen by business leaders as a gatekeeper, headed by an executive derisively
dubbed the "CF No." Hamstrung by their siloed processes and finance-centric view of the world,
CF Nos steer their companies to suboptimal performance because companies perform best when
finance operates not as a gatekeeper but as a true business partner–a strategic adviser, an identi-fier of opportunities, a facilitator in seizing and capitalizing on those opportunities. Without that
partnership, companies evolving and competing in an ever-changing marketplace are almost
certainly destined to fall short.

Finance extracts data after the books
have closed and delivers reports that look backward rather than forward.

"Compared with where we were 30 years ago, current systems are manna from heaven," says
Robert Kugel, CFO and head of business research at Ventana Research, a benchmark research
and advisory services firm. "But for where we’re headed, today’s solutions will be increasingly
inadequate." It isn’t just the systems themselves that are the problem, he says. Companies don’t
pay enough attention to how they handle data. Consequently, extracting, processing, and deliv-ering information from them is often spreadsheet-based, making it manually intensive and
time-consuming.

Full Report: http://www.information-management.com/pdfs/tidemark-harvard-business-review-report.pdf

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