Finance’s role in tech implementation and ‘business readiness’

July 17, 2024

A blog post by Beth Kaplan, Katie Glynn, Brad Schulte and Carrie McFarland

Today’s finance function is focused on harnessing the capabilities of emerging technologies to transform their most important, complex processes. However, many underestimate the effort that goes into a successful implementation journey. Meaningful business involvement is critical for a successful finance-led, system-enabled transformation, and finance and accounting leaders should understand the critical role they can play in getting to the “go-live” stage with a purpose-built, sustainable technology solution implemented through a “business readiness” principal focus.

With a clear understanding of what defines transformation business readiness through technology and data, processes, and people, finance and accounting leaders can harness some key activities and considerations to help navigate challenges and drive successful outcomes from their technology-enabled implementation journeys.

Defining ‘business readiness’ and its value in tech transformation

What does business readiness mean? Quite simply, it means business leaders have ensured users are appropriately prepared to adopt and effectively use a new technology to execute business processes before “going live” with said technology. This requires meaningful business involvement and a targeted focus on mission-critical areas—both vital for a successful finance-led, system-enabled implementation journey that leverages technology capabilities to reflect organizational requirements and drive quality outcomes.

To assess the level of business readiness for an organization implementation, readiness can be further defined in what it may look like around the primary areas of technology and data, processes and controls, and people.

Mitigating challenges leading up to ‘go-live’

Unforeseen challenges often emerge at the end of the transformation journey. However, executing key business readiness activities may proactively mitigate many common challenges, such as getting started late and having no backup plan. Other challenges business readiness activities may circumvent include a lack of consensus or unified vision, the exclusion of stakeholders in communication, design, and training, and other user-related issues. Process and controls activities can help mitigate difficulty in operationalization, overlooked system integration or data accuracy, and other functionality challenges.

Elements of controllership and finance’s role throughout transformation

Business readiness activities are important throughout the end-to-end implementation life cycle. Through enhanced, targeted finance involvement in some vital integration activities, finance can drive business readiness and organizations can be better positioned to achieve their transformation vision. Here are some highlighted examples of potential integration activities and deliverables for finance’s role at each stage of an implementation.

Finance talent and capabilities that empower transformation

Successful implementations and business readiness are not inclusive to actions and processes. A large part of Day 1 success rests on qualities that empower team excellence. Some extremely valuable attributes can steer the direction of transformation by ensuring the organization is well-equipped and strategically positioned for a successful transition. Look out for and consider these differentiating qualities when assembling a business readiness team for an implementation journey:

Visionary focus: A clear articulation of the envisioned future and the transformative changes required to reach it.

User-centric perspective: The foresight into the end user’s interaction with technology and their specific needs for a successful adoption.

Process mastery: A profound understanding of current processes and their evolution from the technology-enabled transformation.

Empowered leadership: The command and influence to drive stakeholders toward coordinated action to achieve transformation success.

As today’s finance function focuses on harnessing emerging technology to transform its most important and complex processes, prioritizing business readiness, finding the right team, and maximizing finance’s role throughout the life cycle can transform the implementation journey. To explore more insights into how finance leaders can lean in to drive quality outcomes and enduring benefits from their technology-enabled transformations, listen to our Dbriefs webcast: Getting to ‘go-live’: Finance’s role in tech implementation readiness: Dbriefs webcast | Deloitte US