Around the world we have thousands of customers with an annual turnover of €100M+. Some of these businesses haven’t existed that long; others have been around for many years.

When you look at the history of these businesses, the majority of them haven’t changed that much. However, the world is totally different than when they were founded. I should say change seems inevitable, but it is still rare.

Companies don’t always see the impact of not changing, as I wrote in my latest article. Others would like to change but often CFOs are not able to provide correct information, with their presentations and spreadsheets, to their board members. One of the reasons is that technology from the past doesn’t provide the real time information that is necessary today. In fact, more than 60% of boards are worried about poor execution of strategy.

Act Like Silos or as a Machine

When I follow the news, more and more organisations are removing the ‘silos’ within the company. Silos are groups or departments within an organisation that work in a vacuum with little functional access to other groups, or little communication between them.

When companies have silos, people have little interest in understanding their part in the overall success of the organisation. Removing the silos improves horizontal information sharing and collaboration. For example: when finance has access to other departments they can leverage financial data and take action based on the analysis that they have done.

Data analysis provides:

Additional insights that could have impact at the decision making process
Additional insights could change business process and models

On the one hand the analysis is focused on profit and costs (finance), on the other hand, quantities and timelines (sales & operations). The power of insights is the combination of both, because relational data says a lot more than a single number (Shron, M., Thinking with Data, New York: O'Reilly Media, 2014).

Empower Success

Company boards want to make decisions based on the right information to improve the success of the company. Modern applications can alleviate the silo structure and in this way enable finance to become a business partner of the company board. Then finance will be able to provide valuable data to the board. Together you will stay strong.

Have no fear to make changes. Download the whitepaper.

This post is a copy of the article that I have written for the Oracle Modern Finance Essentials, published at September 2, 2016

https://blogs.oracle.com/modernfinance/go-radical-have-no-fear-to-make-changes