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Perspectives

Taking the reins

Controllership’s new approach to technology-enabled transformation

Controllership can harness the capabilities of emerging technologies and optimize the function’s value by taking the reins and performing a more hands-on role throughout the transformation and implementation process. Here are some considerations for finance leaders on the elements of their involvement that can drive successful outcomes and leading-edge transformation.

July 25, 2023

A blog post by Beth Kaplan, Katie Glynn, Brad Schulte & Shipra Khurana

Today’s imperative to transform through emerging technology is changing the financial landscape. Things are evolving rapidly and on such a massive scale; it may seem like we can never keep up. This rapid pace of change drives the accelerated digital transformation of controllership—affecting operating models, data models, processes, strategies, roles—essentially the whole function. The speed and scale of this shift can leave controllers feeling uneasy about embracing emerging technology while maintaining stewardship over their organization’s financial information.

The fact is, transformation through technology is hard, and that uneasy feeling is usually grounded in past challenging experiences. Today, organizations are struggling through their technology-enabled transformations, and many fail to successfully achieve their sought-after objectives. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The key to successful transformation is ownership. Controllership can harness the capabilities of emerging technologies, operate efficiently through change, and optimize the function’s value by “taking the reins” and having a more hands-on role throughout the implementation process.

Next, we further explore how leaders within controllership can lean into their technology-driven evolution to optimize success.

Key drivers of transformation

While achieving successful transformation by leveraging technology can be challenging, the benefits are driving a transformation imperative at most organizations. Exploring the primary drivers of transformation within controllership helps in understanding why technology is being relied upon to drive the business toward achieving a future-state vision and strategy.

  • The evolving role of the controller: A key imperative of many controllers’ organizations is to become a more strategic, collaborative business partner to key stakeholders throughout the organization.
  • Maximizing technology: Today’s innovative technology can truly transform business processes. The emerging technologies such as data processing, artificial intelligence (AI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and user experience cannot be ignored in terms of value market trends.
  • Harvesting optimized data value: Data is expanding and accelerating exponentially. Whether it is core financial data or other data delivered daily, there needs to be an ability to have control over data in a centralized, flexible model that can be exploited to drive business insights and reporting.
  • Standardizing for success: Evolving nonstandardized processes effectively to accommodate standard functionalities and automation, particularly for those processes that have been nonstandardized for years, is a key driver of why organizations are looking for finance transformation today.
  • Scaling to grow: Aligning with the changing operational landscape and transformations to meet new security and compliance requirements such as the recent environmental, social, and governance reporting/disclosure requirements. The business may be in one place right now, but projections may show the business is going somewhere different in the near future. These projections lead to questions about technology and solutions that need to be in place for the business’s future.
  • Struggling with resources: The need for additional resources and bandwidth to support a full-scale transformation. Doing more with less is always the challenge. Finding ways to engage the workforce away from more manual tasks and toward becoming more of a strategic business partner enables the organization to be more efficient with its resources.

Elements of controllership’s involvement in a successful digital transformation

Enhanced, targeted involvement by the controller’s organization in its technology implementation can help achieve its vision for transformation. With a focus on the following key areas, organizations can drive outcomes that reflect their organizational requirements and aspirations and achieve best-in-class transformation.

Many transformations have a lot of stakeholders across the enterprise and with that comes competing priorities and objectives both inside and outside finance. To ensure the strategic objectives of the program maintain a priority, it is imperative that the controllership function has a seat at the table as a leader in the transformation journey. Beyond leadership, it is crucial to have an authoritative voice and decision-making capabilities to support the ongoing transformation, highlight risks and other issues, and align finance objectives with the enterprise.

In many technology-enabled programs, organizations need more clearly defined roles and responsibilities across the enterprise. Any process needs clear roles and responsibilities, communicated effectively to the affected workforce, to successfully achieve objectives. However, organizations may have multiple directives or fail to define roles and responsibilities that support the transformation objectives in a meaningful way. Aside from clearly defined responsibilities, consider roles beyond legacy involvement to other activities throughout the implementation life cycle that would benefit strategic objectives.

For example, for a business process or project, do people understand what everyone is responsible for? Many large programs do not have a clear RACI chart or matrix, which stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. People may have to sort through unclear responsibilities and take a lot of unnecessary time doing so. For example, who is responsible for system integration testing, unit testing, and user acceptance testing? They should be tested by different people from different departments. Clear roles and responsibilities are important for a project to run effectively and hit milestones on time.

Many technology-enabled transformations will affect multiple functions across the organization, and the requirements of each function will affect where you can go with a potential solution. To enable a more successful transformation with the right solutions for the business, cut through the functional, business unit, or geographic silos from the start to promote collaboration and avoid designing solutions that don’t capture the full set of requirements, leading to rework.

For example, how often do you need to have compliance with different tax, statutory, and local reporting requirements, and how do they impact strategy? With an implementation solution, it is critical to have everyone on board from day one.

Digital technology solutions that truly benefit the business will always have strong, consistent, and transparent documentation during the entire life cycle of the transformation program. Everything should be documented—from the design, to building and testing, through go-live and post-launch. This includes decisions, change management, progress, and results. It will also involve tools, resources, and training for team members and the ongoing efforts after implementation.

For example, the business needs solid, strong documentation throughout the life cycle of transformation progress because your auditors will be asking you questions about the milestones, decisions made, and more about the solution. You may want to prepare and have some tough conversations if good documentation isn’t there to support the audit.

Skill sets and capabilities of an effective business integration team

As the pace of transformation continues to accelerate, finance leaders and organizations that attach their roles to implementation must create tangible benchmarks to measure success. When your team is just at the starting line, there are ways to measure skills and team dynamics that benefit transformation. Consider these attributes that can help ensure a team is set up for success.

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Process experience

Have a strong understanding of existing business processes, including the challenges and opportunities the process poses. Since one key purpose of transformation is to do process standardization, understanding the business processes and challenges can inform some of the opportunities that may exist. In addition, ensuring that those who are aligned with the program also have expertise in the space is important to keying in on process transformation strategies.

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Analytics mindset

Make use of statistics and data analysis to ask the right questions and effectively identify solutions to achieve the future state. Remember, understanding and leveraging data for insights and embedding some of these skill sets in our controllership and finance teams is crucial to tech transformations that utilize massive data, such as ERP.

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Future vision focused

The team needs people who support the long-term strategy and take ownership of contributions per guiding principles, including a mindset for the program’s progression, to enable project success.

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Understand the implementation life cycle and related process

Know the common functionalities of emerging technologies and can apply project management leading practices to produce better outcomes. Understanding what an implementation life cycle looks like, even with different solutions, is similar in the phases and process of getting to go-live. However, many professionals may not understand the process from a week-to-week or day-to-day level. Having this understanding and a deeper knowledge of the program—including advanced technical skills and specialized expertise—throughout the implementation phases can drive the team to better contribute their knowledge and own their part of the process.

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    Explore additional considerations and real-world perspectives about finance’s role in technology-enabled transformation in our webcast Dbriefs, “Taking the reins: Finance’s role in technology-enabled transformation,” the first in a series of explorations around the evolving relationship between finance and technology transformation and how controllers can play a more impactful role to drive the future of controllership.

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