Finance Data Opportunities and Challenges

Big data and analytics technology have helped countless organizations improve their performance and arrive at deeper insights about key business drivers. Organizations are now able to visualize data in sophisticated ways that would not be possible even a decade ago. The fact that organizations can now correlate, analyze, and visualize data to answer business questions leads many people to declare that data is “the new oil:” a valuable resource that will produce untold riches. The challenge today is that expectations around data are growing beyond the ability of many organizations to achieve. For example, seven out of every 10 digital transformation initiatives do not deliver the value that organizations expect that they will.

Finance professionals and their leaders are not immune from these broader trends. In a webinar hosted by APQC, Dan French, Founder and CEO at Consider Solutions, shared six data challenges that inhibit excellence and agility in finance:

1. expectations and received wisdom;
2. the need for deep business process knowledge;
3. performance versus defects;
4. hidden meaning in data;
5. technology and digital business; and
6. time to value and opportunity costs.

This article is a summary of the webinar presentation.