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No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It is a recent discussion between Workday’s Terrance Wampler and Stanford Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, explaining why CFOs are well-positioned to lead the AI revolution using a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, has some advice for finance professionals concerned about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace their jobs: “AI is not going to replace CFOs. It is going to replace CFOs who don’t use AI with those who do.”

I [Terrance Wampler] had a great discussion with Professor Brynjolfsson recently at the Workday Future of Intelligent Finance Tour in San Francisco. The event—hosted in partnership with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants-Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (AICPA-CIMA) and Accenture—was designed to help finance and IT professionals leverage AI, machine learning (ML), and other advanced technologies to accelerate their journey to becoming finance futurists.

Brynjolfsson, who also serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, gave attendees a crash course on how AI will reshape the future of finance as we know it. Having just come from a visit to Washington, D.C., to brief the White House and the Council of Economic Advisors on the impact of AI, Brynjolfsson has a front-row seat to the potential for AI to change workforce dynamics. 

“In the early stages of AI, we knew that low-skilled labor would be impacted,” he told me. “As the technology has progressed, we’re seeing that professional workers—CFOs, accountants, lawyers, doctors—are going to be very much affected. Affected doesn’t mean automated. It doesn’t mean replaced. Rather, AI is going to augment your abilities and give you the freedom to do new things.” 

I couldn’t agree more with that positive assessment, which is why we’re investing so heavily in generative AI as the innovation engine for Workday Enterprise Management Cloud. As the group general manager for Workday’s suite of solutions for the office of the CFO, I see generative AI as an enabler of finance’s dual role as value protector and value creator.

Value protection tasks such as internal audit, risk management, and regulatory compliance can benefit from AI’s ability to comb through vast amounts of data to detect and surface anomalies before they destroy a company’s value or market reputation. Large language models (LLMs) can be trained to stay updated on the latest financial regulations, ensuring that compliance is always up to date. They can also assist in risk management by identifying patterns in data that might signify potential risks and by building robust risk models that consider a wide array of factors.

AI can also help drive value creation, whether that’s automating routine tasks to drive cost savings or enabling top-line growth. LLMs, for example, can help predict customer behavior, create more accurate forecasts, and improve scenario modeling by processing a large volume of data and considering a multitude of variables. Augmenting the capabilities of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams would allow them to prepare for a wider range of potential outcomes, making planning more resilient and adaptable to changing market conditions. 

Thanks to productivity gains like these, Brynjolfsson predicts that generative AI will be bigger than any of the technologies we’ve used over the last 10 years. He provided an example from new research he led on how generative AI is boosting call center productivity. 

“A couple of years ago, we teamed up with a company and a couple of Stanford professors and graduates to start a company that helps call centers do a better job,” he said. “And what we found was that the operators who used the AI model were dramatically more productive and more successful than the ones who didn’t, with the least skilled operators 35% more productive.” 

Brynjolfsson went on to explain that the model learned from the most successful operators, listening in on their conversations and identifying phrases or suggestions that improved customer sentiment. The model then passed on those skills to the newest operators. “That’s the kind of tacit knowledge that was previously really hard to automate.”

Generative AI and the CFO Role

Gartner analysts recently noted that CFOs are best positioned to help lead the implementation of generative AI in corporations because they have more insight into opportunities to leverage the technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase revenue streams. “The CFO should be on the frontier of the AI revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “CFOs understand how to work with unstructured and structured data and do sophisticated analyses on that data, which is why they can make such a big impact.” 

Brynjolfsson also sees human resources teams benefiting. “I did an estimate a few years ago and found that the value of human capital in the U.S. economy is a little over $200 trillion—10 times the value of the gross domestic product (GDP). But the problem with human capital is it’s very poorly measured and understood,” he said. “There are a lot of soft intangibles in there. AI’s large language models can do a lot to capture and understand the value of your human capital.” 

Given AI’s power to disrupt the economy, I asked Brynjolfsson about his take on the mood in Washington around regulating AI.

“I came away from my trip really impressed with how up to speed the government officials I met with were on generative AI,” he noted. “They understand that there’s a tidal wave coming that will be bigger than the impact of the pandemic on remote work, and they are taking it very seriously.” 

Brynjolfsson closed out our chat on a positive note, predicting that AI could potentially double the productivity rate currently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade. He also sees AI giving us more resources to address challenges we face on the healthcare front, such as cancer, and on the educational front, such as personalized education. The reason is AI’s ability to unlock human potential versus just seeing it as cost-saving automation. 

“Any one of you who has tried to call an automated voice response system knows it can be very frustrating, especially when there’s a long tail of questions that we ask that aren’t common,” he said. “We humans are much better at dealing with exceptions than machines, so a good partnership is where AI can answer common questions and humans can deal with exceptions. AI has a much higher upside in terms of creating additional value than simply trying to take costs out.” 


Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

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Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It highlights some approaches for professional services firms to keep up with the breakneck pace of work.

Professional services firms don’t have the luxury of gradually adjusting to an evolving digital environment. For them, the digital future is pretty much here. More than one-third of professional services firms expect that at least 75% of their revenue will come from digital by 2025, according to a report by PwC and Workday.

As an additional sign of the changing times, a growing proportion of firms are investing more than $50 million in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and advanced analytics, according to the report. And with recent advances in generative AI, investments are likely to continue to grow. That’s further blurring the line between professional services and digital services—a distinction that will only get fuzzier in the future. 

“Digital first is our new reality. That isn’t going to change,” shared Joe Golden, vice president of services, IBM, at a Workday event.

Yet, despite how adroitly many professional services firms adapted to wide-scale changes brought on by the pandemic, some lack visibility around past behavior and likely future outcomes. “Professional services organizations can be surprisingly opaque when it comes to insight,” IDC reports.

To succeed, firms must solve their data, talent, and technology challenges. But many have yet to embrace this new reality. Among professional services leaders, 57% say there’s a growing gap between where their business is and where it needs to be to compete, according to a recent Workday study on digital transformation. And only 23% say their digital strategy allows them to keep pace with or exceed the demands of the business.

Firms will need to bolster their access to high-quality, always-available data, along with having staff with the necessary data literacy skills to make sense of it all. Of companies with fully-accessible data, 76% say they are well-equipped digitally to ensure business continuity in times of crisis, Workday finds. Small wonder, then, that advanced analytics and data visualization are the skills most sought after by IT leaders (35%) and finance leaders (34%).

“Access to data is the crux of most technology issues in any company,” says Jennifer LaClair, CFO, Ally Financial.

To better understand what the future might hold for professional services firms, industry thought leaders shared their predictions for three of the biggest trends the industry will face. The following excerpt focuses on how professional services firms can benefit from more sophisticated forecasting.

Data Silos Disappear as Organizations Race to Future-Ready Forecasting and Adaptability

To drive productivity and profit and to forecast accurately, future-forward professional services firms will need more integration and less separation of their people and systems. “Today’s professional services organizations simply cannot operate with functional silos as the lines between sales, delivery, and finance become blurred,” SPI asserts.

Unfortunately, these organizations’ data too often sits trapped within silos. “The reason most companies can’t forecast their revenue more accurately is because they have different systems and data across their lines of businesses and services,” Joseph says. “And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent.”

Almost half (49%) of business leaders—and almost two-thirds (62%) of professional services leaders—say their inability to connect operational, people, and financial data to business outcomes impairs the organization’s agility, according to a Workday survey of senior business executives. 

But firms with accessible data tell a different story, the Workday survey reveals. A towering 85% of leaders whose companies enjoy fully accessible data say the organization can embrace change readily. All of which points to the urgent need to overcome siloed data sources.

For ERPA, a consulting and enterprise application managed services firm, adopting professional services automation slashed the time needed to calculate revenue from a full day to just 15 minutes. And the firm gained a stronger forecasting ability in the process. 

“From week to week, we’re able to get a really good sense of our forecasted revenue for projects in the next four to 12 weeks,” says Jon Milkovich, director of Workday financials at ERPA. “So it’s really provided a lot better real-time insight into what our forecasted revenue will be.”

That’s a need that best-in-class firms are meeting head-on. They’re 82% more likely than other firms to be able to share financial and operational data with the extended enterprise through a central repository, Aberdeen finds in its report: “Leverage Demand Planning and Forecasting for Best-in-Class Performance During Volatile Times.”

Learn more about how professional services firms can adapt and change in our recent webinar, Streamlining Professional Business Services with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

Leveraging IBM Planning Analytics for xP&A

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Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

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Professional services firms make money based on the number of hours they service clients. These companies need to have many consultants with desirable skills as billable as possible. They also have to have enough resources available to start new projects as soon as the contracts are signed. In short, professional services firms need to make the best use of the people they have, understand the needs they will have in the future and then appropriately plan for changes in a dynamic market with a history of being a “lumpy” business.

This can present a big challenge. In fact, according to Workday, “Only 29% of professional services leaders say they are confident in their organization’s current financial and business plans.”

This is where enterprise planning can help. With enterprise planning, professional services firms can easily perform demand planning, which can then integrate with project revenue planning, financial forecasting and reporting. These models use the same data and provide the firm with consistent and accurate information. 

Enterprise planning is a key resource for these firms. Professional services companies can perform ad-hoc analysis, asking questions of the data, such as:

  • How many consultants are available/currently “sitting on the bench,” not earning revenue?
  • What skill sets do our current consultants have and what skills are missing?
  • Which new projects are best served by onshore staffing and which new projects are best served by offshore staffing?
  • Do we have enough staff to take on this new project?
  • If a project ends unexpectedly, what existing projects can use those resources?
  • Are we optimizing our people in the most profitable way?

Learn why more and more professional services firms are embracing enterprise planning. Watch our latest webinar on Streamlining Professional Business Services with Workday Adaptive Planning here.

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Revelwood Expands Best-in-Class Solution Portfolio to Include Incorta

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We’re expanding our best-in-class solution portfolio to include Incorta’s open data delivery platform, giving our clients an analytics hub for the Office of Finance. Incorta’s technology simplifies the data ingestion and delivery approach, giving clients unrivaled data access to deliver fast, accurate insights.

“Savvy financial management can be hard to achieve,” said Tom McCrory, senior vice president, sales, Incorta. “It requires a rock-solid foundation of comprehensive data and ad-hoc, self-service analytics. Together, Revelwood and Incorta will help our join clients in the Office of Finance take the next step in providing strategic guidance to business operations.”

Incorta was recently included in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) platforms. It was one of 20 vendors assessed in the report. Incorta directly maps to data sources, eliminating the need for data transformation, reshaping and aggregation required by other platforms.

“The Office of Finance has become a strategic asset for industry-leading organizations,” said Robert Gordy, CTO, Revelwood. “It’s no longer about managing the budget or performing basic accounting activities. Instead, the Office of Finance has evolved into managing all the disparate pieces of data to provide forward-thinking insights for the business. We’re partnering with Incorta to help CFOs and their teams move toward unlimited, active analysis.”

Additionally, Incorta has existing integrations with two of Revelwood’s technology partners – BlackLine and Workday Adaptive Planning.

Incorta and BlackLine

Incorta’s integration with BlackLine enables accounting teams to instantly drill-through to transaction details with a single click. It provides users the ability to access data from multiple ERPs and other source systems with easy, instant access to transaction-level details down to the subledger. By using BlackLine and Incorta together, clients benefit from:

  • A single source for all data
  • Transaction-level detail
  • Streamlined data flows

Incorta and Workday Adaptive Planning

Incorta’s integration with Workday Adaptive Planning accelerates and improves forecasting and planning with access to near real-time transaction-level data. The integration enables:

  • Automating operational analytics
  • Delivering transaction-level detail
  • Unifying enterprise data
  • Streamlining data flows


Learn more about our new partnership with Incorta!

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FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. Philippa Lawrence, chief accounting officer and vice president at Workday, highlights some interesting trends emerging in finance and accounting. 

The past few years have given us a deep appreciation for how quickly the unexpected can upend our assumptions. And there’s no question that uncertainty—around everything from inflation and macroeconomic volatility to geopolitical tensions and regulatory shifts—has dominated discussions at organizations in all industries and regions.

Still, some emerging trends within the accounting field have gained such momentum in recent years that continued acceleration in 2023 seems all but certain. As accounting leaders look to the year ahead, here are three predictions about the seismic shifts reshaping the finance function—and why leaders would be wise to lean into these trends sooner rather than later. 

1. Your Technology Strategy Will Become Your Talent Strategy

Hiring and retaining talent is one of the top challenges CFOs will face, and understanding what employees want can help ease that challenge. For many, the answer is meaningful work, and CFOs know technology plays a role in this. A global survey of 260 CFOs found that nearly half (48%) plan to invest in technology to streamline finance tasks. Even more striking, nearly all (99%) of those making technology a priority agree that technology updates will become even more important for both attracting and retaining employees.

For finance and accounting teams, doing meaningful work is about doing more than manual data aggregation or managing clunky spreadsheets day in and day out. Technology can automate manual processes such as these, enabling staff to focus on more value-added work, such as identifying trends from the data to help the business understand the “why” behind the numbers. And this will become increasingly crucial in a talent market where skilled finance workers are at an all-time premium. According to Deloitte, 82.4% of public company hiring managers for finance and accounting report talent retention as a big challenge. Investing in technologies that automate core processes and streamline user experience will be paramount to building—and retaining—a skilled and agile finance team. 

2. The Journey to Zero-Day Close Will Drive Further Adoption of Accounting Automation Through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Traditionally, reconciling financial statements at the end of a reporting period—whether monthly, quarterly, or annually—has been a labor-intensive process that can take weeks to complete. But an arduous, lengthy close isn’t only a resource drain; it also slows the speed at which data can be analyzed and information gets into the hands of decision-makers. This is a critical vulnerability in today’s business environment of high uncertainty and rapid change, where actionable information is rapidly perishable.

But one of accounting’s most ambitious goals aims to change that: A zero-day close leverages intelligent automation and continuously available, up-to-date information to close the books at any time, dramatically accelerating the pace of internal reporting and data analysis. No wonder 86% of finance executives say they’ve set their sights on achieving a faster, real-time close by 2025, according to Gartner, with more than half of respondents already deploying investments such as general ledger technology and workflow automation.

While a zero-day close is the ultimate goal, every incremental step toward that goal—such as automating manual data entry for invoices or manual journal creation—drives day-to-day process improvements that truly advance the finance function. My team is currently on the journey to achieving a zero-day close. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in our system, we’ve achieved nearly 100% billing accuracy and 100% automation of our cash flow, and the percentage of manual journal entries we now perform is incredibly low. When anomalies arise, they’re surfaced swiftly so we can address them well before they impact the close. 

3. Accounting Will Increasingly Act as a Value-Creation Partner to the Business

In an increasingly complex and interconnected business environment, C-suite leaders recognize that real-time, data-driven decision-making is more important than ever. And while accounting has traditionally been considered a numbers-only profession focused on historical data, technology and transformation have repositioned accounting at the center of strategic decision-making and value creation. For example, accounting leaders are playing a critical role in driving an organization’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy by leveraging technology to analyze data, surface insights, and influence ESG investment decisions.

Whether highlighting the financial implications of operational and strategic decisions, recognizing red flags and inefficiencies, or evaluating opportunities to reposition investments or improve performance, technology is empowering accounting teams to quickly discover real-time insights and analyze the drivers behind the data. Our value as accountants is increasingly demonstrated by our ability to share insights and collaborate with other business functions to ultimately guide strategic planning and decision-making.

The trends reshaping the accounting and finance professions aren’t wholly separate from the larger economic uncertainty and business volatility in which organizations operate today. In many ways, the urgent need for better adaptability and resilience has accelerated the profound shifts underway in how accounting works, contributes, and collaborates across the business. For those in accounting and finance, it looks to be an exhilarating and impactful year ahead. And we’re just getting started.

This article originally appeared in The Journal of Accountancy. ©2023 Association of International Certified Professional Accountants and was also published on the Workday blog.

More from Workday Adaptive Planning:

Revelwood Partners IBM and Workday Named Market Leaders in BARC Score – Integrated Planning & Analytics 2023

Revelwood’s Partners IBM and Workday Named Leaders in IDC Report

Embracing Forward-Looking and Customer-Centric KPIs

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 8

Revelwood Partners IBM and Workday Named Market Leaders in BARC Score – Integrated Planning & Analytics 2023

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Revelwood’s partners IBM and Workday have been named Market Leaders in the recent BARC Score – Integrated Planning & Analytics 2023.

BARC defines Market Leaders as “well-established vendors that drive strong market adoption, supported by technology innovation and strategic acquisitions and by leveraging robust account management and a solid track record. Their portfolio enjoys high brand awareness in the market and covers an extensive range of technologies and services with only few gaps. Market Leaders typically have a large market share, making them a viable contender in almost all implementation scenarios.”

BARC is one of Europe’s leading analyst firms for business software, focusing on the areas of data, business intelligence (BI) and analytics. This year’s BARC Score for Integrated Planning & Analytics assessed Anaplan, Board International, IBM, insightsoftware, Jedox, OneStream Software, Oracle, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.

“Today, the reality in many companies is that IP&A is an often proclaimed but seldom achieved goal,” writes BARC. “BARC research studies continuously reveal that companies consider the improvement of the software they use to be an important investment for optimizing planning, forecasting and analytics.”

BARC notes that “the software market for IP&A is highly competitive.” Read and download the full report here.

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Revelwood’s Partners IBM and Workday Named Leaders in IDC Report

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Two of Revelwood’s partners, IBM and Workday, have been named Leaders in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting Applications 2022 Vendor Assessment for IBM Planning Analytics and Workday Adaptive Planning. 

The report assessed 13 vendors in the market. In addition to IBM and Workday Adaptive Planning, IDC looked at Anaplan, Board International, insightsoftware, Planful, Prophix, OneStream, Oracle, SAP, Syntellis, Vena Solutions and Unit4. 

“We expect companies to continue to invest in modern enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting applications to help them adapt to changes in the business environment and enhance agility to combat market volatility,” said Raymond Huo, senior analyst in IDC’s Business Analytics and Decisioning market research and advisory practice. 

This report is based on a “comprehensive and rigorous framework.” The vendors included in the report had to meet the following criteria:

  • Have standalone, packaged enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting applications on the market
  • Meet the threshold of $50 million in enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting software revenue in C&21 based on IDC’s Semiannual Software Tracker
  • Have market presence and momentum

Download this report for IDC’s viewpoint on IBM and Workday Adaptive Planning and to learn:

  • How disruption has impacted the market
  • Why differentiation in this market is challenging
  • The latest developments in software features
  • Why rapid innovation is expected to continue
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Workday Adaptive Planning Framework: Purchase Order Management for Organization-Wide Planning

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Purchase orders are typically viewed from a procurement perspective – usually to make key decisions about sales and inventory, or to audit vendors. But they can also provide the finance and project management teams with important information for planning processes. You can give key members of your planning team more direct access to these purchase orders by incorporating them into Workday Adaptive Planning.

In this video, Haley Elliot, presales solutions consultant here at Revelwood, demonstrates how Workday Adaptive Planning’s purchase order functionality can be used as a unified data point for teams across the organization. These include procurement, finance and project management. 

By incorporating purchase orders with Workday Adaptive Planning you can transform your purchase order details from siloed and static information into dynamic forecasts that can be leveraged in a planning process across multiple business units in your organization. 

This video is a Workday-approved planning template and is a conceptual framework for clients deploying Workday Adaptive Planning. This framework for purchase order management adheres to best-practice guidelines and has been validated by Workday with Revelwood clients who have successfully used it. 

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Workday Adaptive Planning? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

Fueling Business Agility with Continuous Planning

FP&A Done Right: ESG – An Imperative for Growth

FP&A Done Right: Forecasting Revenue for Services-Based Businesses: A Growth Factor

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Embracing Forward-Looking and Customer-Centric KPIs

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, highlighting a virtual panel discussion on “The Emerging CFO: Rethinking KPIs in the Digital Era.”

Revenue. Profit. Sales. Cash. The metrics that have traditionally defined business success remain relevant but are quickly evolving. Today, more executives are shifting their focus to bring forward-looking key performance indicators (KPIs) into the mix.

From customer lifetime value (CLV) to net retention rate (NRR) to customer satisfaction (CSAT), CFOs are looking to nonfinancial metrics to help them predict the future financial health and profitability of their organizations. Of particular note is the move toward more customer-focused metrics, a reaction to an increasingly data-driven consumer.

“The fact that every single customer you have has a supercomputer in their purse or their pocket changes the way that we can analyze data and engage with people,” said Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT Sloan School Initiative on the Digital Economy, in a virtual panel hosted by Fortune and Workday. 

A broader, more holistic set of KPIs lets finance leaders make proactive, strategic decisions rather than simply reacting to change. The idea, Schrage said, is to move toward more future-predictive, future-orientated KPIs versus ones that simply confirm that an organization made a wrong move. “That doesn’t help you very much,” he said. 

The panel, which discussed the evolving role of the CFO, also included Harmit Singh, executive vice president and CFO at Levi Strauss & Co.; Alka Tandan, CFO at Gainsight; and Kae Arima, vice president of finance at Workday. The conversation revolved around how KPIs are changing in the digital era and how CFOs must shift their perspective. 

Where Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

As data becomes easier to collect and analyze, business leaders are turning to measurement, instrumentation, and analytics to gain insights around performance. They’re also assessing the portfolio of KPIs across the enterprise to see how specific metrics correlate. For instance, does a positive employee experience correspond to higher customer lifetime value? How do both of those KPIs affect the bottom line? 

Looking at a broader portfolio of KPIs lets leaders understand where work is producing the most valuable results. For example, going beyond gross customer retention rates to NRR helps leaders understand which customer segments are stable, which ones are growing—and how much effort it takes to cultivate that growth.

“Especially in an environment where money is now a lot more expensive and it takes a lot more money to acquire a new customer, looking at your current customer base and growing it that way becomes a lot more efficient,” Tandan said.

Taking a more holistic view of data can also help leaders see which teams are doing the most to achieve business goals. Determining what portion of customer lifetime value growth can be attributed to sales, customer success, and operations, for example, offers insights that could inform future strategies and investments.

How Do You Get Hard Numbers?

Going forward, CFOs will need to more actively identify what attributes are associated with success, so the organization can update and monitor KPIs accordingly. But getting there requires access to reliable, real-time business intelligence—and data doesn’t flow freely across many organizations. 

“For something like customer lifetime value, finance is really dependent on the sales organization or the marketing organization to share that data with them. And that’s not always easy,” Arima said. 

Singh recounted his experience during his early days at Levi’s, which was a highly customized systems, applications, and products shop when he came on board. Each region had its own enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool and the company had more than 10 data warehouses. 

“And so the data didn’t necessarily talk to each other, and people were using different ERPs that didn’t talk to each other,” Singh said. At the time, he suggested moving the company onto a single ERP system, but he was told it would be a career-limiting move and that he should focus on turning around the company first. So, he moved the data into one warehouse that is now being converted into a single ERP system on the cloud. 

“I told my technology folks—including the board because it’s a major investment—that the success of the ERP is not going to be driven by the technology,” Singh said. “It’s going to be driven by the data unlock and the data governance that is going to happen.”

Who Owns All That Data?

Real-time data platforms can also boost performance on the front lines. “We connect with our consumers either through retailers or directly in our stores,” Singh said. “So, arming our retail associates with data and empowering them to make decisions based on data is critical.” 

Giving employees information about customer buying trends could help them focus their attention on the right upselling decisions. It also helps store managers see where their location may be underperforming and find ways to improve. Store managers can also input their own observations on what’s working and what isn’t into company apps that associates can access.

However, giving teams access to customer and operational data requires strong data governance—and agreement across the enterprise. But leaders often disagree about who owns particular KPIs, how they should be shared, and who is accountable, which means CFOs will need to play a larger role in closing the gap and arbitrating conflict. That’s been the case at Gainsight, where Tandan says she has taken on the responsibility for data validation. This helps ensure there is a single source of truth the executive team can work from.

The organization also identifies which executives are responsible for key metrics and creates a one-page strategic plan for each employee based on the KPIs and the executives responsible for them.

“So every single employee—if they’re attached to that executive—has a piece of [that metric],” Tandan said.

Regularly reviewing KPIs to ensure they’re in alignment with current business conditions is critical, Tandan said. That way, CFOs can ensure that their organizations remain relevant in a rapidly changing economic environment.

Watch the Fortune webcast: “The Emerging CFO: Rethinking KPIs in the Digital Era.” This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from Workday Adaptive Planning:

FP&A Done Right: ESG – An Imperative for Growth

FP&A Done Right: Forecasting Revenue for Services-Based Businesses: A Growth Factor

FP&A Done Right: The Changing Role of the CFO

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