Digital Finance Organisation: Are You Ready?
AUTHOR: WOON-HUI OH
SENIOR ASSOCIATE CONSULTANT
Woon-Hui is a Senior Project Management professional with 20+ years of global experience. She specialises in Business Transformation and Improvement, with particular expertise in Performance Management, Customer Experience and Data/Information Management.
Building on our earlier post, Digital Transformation: Where to Start, let’s look at the critical success criteria for digital transformation in Finance. It primarily comes down to Organisational Readiness. But, more specifically, it is about people. The rapid technological advancements are disrupting the way finance organisations work, and finance professionals must adapt. As a result, we now see increased intelligent automation, real-time insight, self-service, and the integration of a diverse workforce – even including machine-based roles. What, then, is the ideal future finance professional’s profile?
The Right Digital Finance Skills Will Give the Organisation Competitive Advantage
The three core skills – data intuition, communication, and transformation – are not just fundamental to the Digital Finance organisation, but they also provide a significant competitive advantage. Identifying, developing, and nurturing these traits will be critical to the success of your organisation in the digital era.
Data
Firstly, it is about data – having the appropriate data intuition, communication, and transformation capabilities. The real value of Finance professionals will shine through via their ability to:
- Interpret and use data analytics and insights to support organisational strategy and decisions – data intuition;
- Communicate the insights or challenges clearly to both technical and non-technical teams and leverage the data in risk management – data communication;
- Mine and integrate fragmented data sets across organisational units to form a complete picture – data transformation.
Business Partnering
Secondly, solid business-partnering skills are critical. A capable business partner can build effective and impactful relationships. A Finance professional who builds these relationships with a healthy dose of customer service orientation, strong collaboration skills and flexibility will influence and deliver where it matters, feeling influential and impactful.
Driving business improvement and innovation through commercial understanding, expertise in strategy, value and performance management and corporate governance provide the foundations for the quality of those relationships.
Technology
Third, a proper appreciation and understanding of digital technologies. As digital innovation evolves, the Finance professional will tap into these technologies to derive more value for the Finance organisation.
To do this, they should be able to grasp the intricacies and how these technologies work – to collaborate with the technical teams (data scientist, developer) on exploiting the technologies to enable:
- higher performance
- increased productivity
- more integrated risk management
At a minimum, this means having a knack for technology and communicating effectively about technology. In addition to the weight of digital skills increasing in Finance roles, new roles with corresponding expertise are now emerging. These roles emphasise systems, tools, (intelligent) automation and data expertise, data analytics, assisted insights, and modelling.
Digital Behaviours are Critical for the World-Class Digital Finance Organisation
In the future, finance organisations will need to be robust and agile. Additionally, the ability to collaborate globally in a virtual workplace, with an increasing focus on data, business partnering and technology, will be a differentiator. For organisations and teams to succeed, there are, therefore, three critical pillars:
Effective Communication
Build a robust culture that supports collaboration
Building Trust
Shared Mission
Collaborative Spirit
Strategic Team Building
Maintaining or Improving Productivity
Establish accountability
Set expectations for each role and have organisational role models
Implement checks & balances to prevent never-ending workdays leading to exhaustion and resentment
Where to start with a Digital Finance Organisation?
Starting with the end in mind, we can work with you to define how the new Digital Finance organisation should look. Together, we can develop an organisational readiness roadmap that integrates people, processes, and technology seamlessly.
How can Loughridge Transformations support your Digital Finance Transformation?
As a process-led, people-led Finance Transformation practice, people are always at the core of our design solutions. Loughridge Transformations focuses on organisational structure, capability, and culture while ensuring process design reflects the latest digital developments. We provide successful and sustainable delivery through the Loughridge Transformations’ Nine Steps to Finance Transformation.
Loughridge Transformations can offer – with no further obligations – short virtual workshops that your organisation can use as the first building block in Finance organisational readiness for digital transformation.
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