Transcription
The finance leader’splaybook to digitaltransformation
Table of contentsSummary .3Zone one: Culture and talent .5Culture .6Assessing the finance team’s culture .6Strategies and tactics to evolve culture .6Example: Creating a culture of feedback .8Talent .9Assessing talent for today and tomorrow .9Strategies and tactics to strengthen the talent bench.10Example: Promoting breadth and business acumen .12Anaplan’s value .13Zone two: Capabilities .14Assessing the finance function’s capabilities .15Strategies and tactics to build new capabilities.16Example: Creating a granular view of sales .18Anaplan’s value .19Zone three: Operating model and processes .20Assessing gaps in finance’s operating model.20Strategies and tactics to enhance processes .21Example: Leaner processes with bottoms-up forecasting . 23Anaplan’s value .24Conclusion.25The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan2
SummaryEmboldened by digital transformation, today’s finance leaders mustreevaluate their strategic value and influence on the business. Digitaltransformation has opened the door to powerful new ways finance canassess and understand the business, surface insights and opportunities,enable more informed decisions, and contribute measurablebusiness value.How can finance leaders orchestrate this transformation? “The financeleader’s playbook to digital transformation,” is your roadmap to identifyingmodernization goals, evaluating what you need to get there, and makingit happen.For many companies, decade-old legacy technologies and spreadsheetsshared over email are still at the core of many processes—includingmonthly P&L reporting and long-range planning. Even those organizationsthat have begun to transition to cloud-based digital capabilities often facelimits to achieving organization accountability and visibility into businessperformance drivers. New tools to fully democratize data, improvetransparency, and enable connected business planning are necessaryto bridge the gaps.What’s more, attitudes and habits must change to get the most out of newsystems and ways of working. Finance leaders need to take a holisticapproach to enabling their transformation journey through focused effortsacross the organization’s culture, capabilities, and operating model.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan3
In this playbook, four senior finance and information technology executivesVictor Barnes is Senior Vice President ofwith experience guiding Fortune 500 organizations through digitalConnected Planning at Anaplan. Previouslytransformation weigh in on the three zones of (1) culture and talent,he was global CFO of the McDonald’s division(2) capabilities and (3) operating model and processes to transformat the Coca-Cola Company, culminatingthe business and create elevated business value.a 26-year career at Coca-Cola leadingglobal teams.The three zones of digital transformationSara Baxter-Orr is Global Head of CFO Practiceat Anaplan, responsible for driving initiatives andprograms that guide the expanding role of theCultureand talentOperating modeland processestransformational finance leader. Previously,Capabilitiesto transform the business and createelevated business valueshe was Senior Vice President and CFO at theVerizon Business Group.Ray Curbelo is Global Line of Business Leaderfor Finance at Anaplan. As Assistant Vice Presidentof Global Financial Planning and Analysis for UnumGroup, he led Unum’s FP&A team building anintegrated platform.Carla Moradi, Senior Vice President of Go-ToMarket Transformation at Anaplan, has been aCIO responsible for leading digital and businesstransformations in the retail, health care, insurance,and technology sectors, including five yearsas CIO at Walgreens Boots Alliance.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan4
Zone one: Culture and talentChange is uncomfortable. Human beings hold to the familiar with remarkable tenacity. No matter hownecessary, simple, and promising the modernization may be, getting people to embrace a major transitionto new ways of doing things is a challenge.“I spend time making sure our teams understand the speed and scope of change in today’s world, and thenecessity of developing new skills,” said Victor Barnes, senior vice president of Connected Planning atAnaplan. “The goal is not to automate processes and eliminate people. It is to better leverage their talentand inspire engagement so they can focus on the business and customers instead of manicuring data.”“Culture and talent matter because people are the greatest source of positive change in any organization,”said Barnes. “Your number-one driver for growth is culture and talent. It’s always just people.”“Your number-one driver for growth is cultureand talent. It’s always just people.”Victor Barnes, Senior Vice President of Connected Planning, AnaplanThe finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan5
CultureJob shadows How is the finance team interacting?Assessing the finance team’s culture How are they partnering with the rest of the organization? What are the daily habits of the finance team? Do these habits and interactions support what the business values most? How are they balancing the reactionary nature of their role with theThe first step to modernizing your finance organization is to gain an understanding of the finance team’s culture. What values and priorities do theyembody and transmit to the rest of the organization?opportunity to anticipate and proactively address opportunities orchallenges?Ray Curbelo, global line of business leader for finance at Anaplan, recommends taking the time to explore the culture of the finance organization indepth. “It’s a fantastic investment not only for a new leader to learn aboutSurveysthe business, the organization, but also to learn how the finance organiza- What is the most valuable contribution you make to the business?tion is applying their capabilities, and what culture is expressing itself.” What does finance contribute that makes your job easier or moreTactics for assessing cultureproductive? What actually happens?Finance leadership should engage directly with their team, from the topdown, through middle and lower management, via focus group roundtablediscussions and job shadows in which leaders pair with members of theirteam to see first-hand what they do in their day-to-day role. Partnership surveys sent to leadership within the finance organization and across businessfunctions can provide a valuable window into finance culture and talent.Here are some of the questions you can consider for each of these tactics:Focus groupsWhen you go to finance for help, what do you hope will happen? How does the partnership with finance bring value to the organizationoverall?The information you gather will help you understand what the businessneeds versus what finance is delivering. Are there disparities between whatmatters most to the business and what finance prioritizes?Strategies and tactics to evolve cultureOrganizational culture can be one of the biggest barriers to change and How does the finance organization define success? What do they aspire to contribute to the business? How do they assess what the business needs? Are there gaps between finance’s priorities and what the businessOvercoming the resistance to change takes persistence, but once resultactually values?start coming in, resistance shifts to enthusiasm that can spread to othernotoriously difficult to budge. How you communicate and what you chooseto put in the spotlight can move the cultural needle.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan6
“Maybe you do great audit and governance, but thebusiness isn’t that excited about it. On the otherhand, you might have modest analytic capabilitiesbut that’s really important to the business. You’reover-invested in governance and underinvestedin insight generation. What’s your strategy toimpact this gap?”Ray Curbelo, Finance Line of Business Leader, Anaplanareas of the business. To move your organizational culture, looktry something new to make an impact. Additionally, these leadersto these areas:communicate openly with their teams and their business partners aboutthe opportunity in front of them when they partner for change.Empower problem solvingEncourage and reward a mindset of empowerment. What problems areCelebrate innovative thinkingholding back the finance organization? What problems have been there soGrowth-minded finance leaders encourage entrepreneurial thinking andlong no one notices them anymore? Identify them and take action to resolveidea sharing and crowd sourcing. You can encourage people to thinkthem, even if they seem impossible to change.differently and challenge the status quo by bringing financial analysts andothers together for a hackathon guided by a data scientist. Invite competingPeople might say, ‘I can’t do anything to improve this arcane planning pro-groups to get creative searching for insights in a data set. What can youcess because the keepers of the process don’t allow change.’ You want tolearn about the business from the data?nurture a mindset that rewards taking ownership and driving change.Once everyone has presented their ideas, ask the data scientist to showCommit to curiosityEmbrace curiosity, model an affinity for change and agile learning, andovercome the fear of trying a new way of doing things.A growth-minded finance leader has the curiosity to step into the unknown.They don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over; they want towhat can be done with correlations to help the team make new connections.This exercise highlights data acumen and helps the team make new linkagesbetween what’s happening across the business. By correlating differentelements with each other, you can find new insights that are not necessarilyevident otherwise.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan7
Example: Creating a culture of feedbackWhen a new CFO arrived at a leading insurance company withIndividual level: Performance goalsa mandate to drive modernization, there were three goals:The way the finance team was evaluated was shifted to encourage Drive finance’s digital transformation. Optimize finance resources. Bring new value from the finance organization to the business.Surveys of the culture revealed that finance was seen by the businessless as strategic partners than as order takers. The CFO decided to starta focus on enabling business success and taking feedback seriously. not just from those they report to within finance, but also fromthose they interacted with throughout the business. projects. Everyone was on board and incentivized to engageThe goal: Gain a better understanding of what finance’s customerswith their business peers.in the business expect, how finance is measuring up against thoseFinance leadership implemented a program of tactics to shift the culture toward feedback, targeting ongoing dialogue and improvement.Leadership level: Engagement surveysCommunicationThe finance team changed the way they talked about theiraccomplishments, looking at results from the point of viewof their business customers. perspective.levels of management across the enterprise, asking such questions as:What kind of interaction have you had with finance? Have you seen improvements since our last survey? How much value is finance driving for you as a business partner?At quarterly meetings, town halls, company updates, and otherpresentations, results are presented from the business unit’sEvery six months, finance sent a business partnership survey to all This, in turn, compelled managers to ensure that employeesdeveloped the habit of seeking feedback as they completea dialogue with the business to find out how finance could do more.expectations, and what kind of impact finance’s contribution is making.Individual performance goals were tied to 360-degree feedback They focused on business accomplishments, their valueto the business, and how finance contributed to it.The result was a shift in culture toward active partnerships to enablethe business. As the business came to view finance as a valuablepartner, they leaned into finance for insight on business decisions.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan8
TalentAssessing talent for today and tomorrowAccomplishing your goals requires the skills to execute your vision. What isthe talent profile at your organization today, and what talent do you need totake the team into the future? How will you cultivate the talent you need toachieve your objectives, and how can you build strength? Can you build theskills you need internally, or do you need to look outside the organization?Regardless of industry, transformational skills require data literacy, technologyacumen, and business experience in addition to financial expertise. What talentgaps are standing in the way of progress toward your transformation goals?To assess gaps in the talent pool, consider the finance organization froma business perspective. How can finance drive the most value for thebusiness? What is your competitive advantage within the finance functionto drive value for the business? What skills will you need today, and in thefuture, to achieve longer-term goals and initiatives? Your resources shouldbe aligned with the areas with the greatest potential to contribute businessvalue, where you can best leverage the unique skills of the finance team.If you devote significant resources to a function that is necessary but not asource of new business value, can that function be optimized, outsourced,or automated?In terms of bench depth, are you building the pipeline you need to developleadership over time? Are you creating opportunities for finance leadersto gain the business experience they need to move up?The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan9
Strategies and tactics to strengthenthe talent benchThe skills and credentials traditionally associated with finance are no longerCollaborate with business units to rotate finance talentsufficient to deliver the business value that the transformational financeCycle rising leaders to various business units to gain experience leadingfunction seeks to contribute. To transform the finance function and theinnovation projects or heading up new divisions or regions. It’s importantbusiness, you’ll need technology acumen and data literacy as well asfor your team to understand how the business works, including commercialexperience in the business.strategies, sales, marketing, supply chain, and operations.“Today’s finance talent has a much different profile than finance talentTie talent assessment to broader accountabilityof the past,” said Sara Baxter-Orr, global head of CFO practice at Anaplan.“Thanks to automation, finance talent needs to be much more strategic.You need to have modeling capabilities, mathematical capabilities, andrigorous data fluency as well as intellectual curiosity about the forensicsinvolved in analyzing data.”Several strategies can help you level-up abilities within your organizationand recruit valuable external talent.Create a finance talent board with VPs across different areas of the financeorganization. Use this board to evaluate potential promotions based oncriteria that spans organizational performance goals.“Based on how you structure that governance model for strategic initiatives—your daily operations, leadership assessments, talent assessments—thatin itself drives culture,” said Curbelo. “The talent board holds individualsaccountable to more than an individual manager, encouraging teamworkand a collective commitment to change.”Broaden recruitment beyond traditional finance backgroundsBusiness and technology experience may help infuse talent in certainfinance roles, particularly as you increase engagement with the businessand advance digital transformation.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan10
Cultivate data literacyPrioritize digital capabilities and data fluency. Create programs to develop greater understanding of technologyimplementations and data science. Baxter-Orr recommends implementing a data acumen test to prove aminimum level of data fluency, as well as requiring the finance team to advance their skills with at least 15hours of digital literacy education each year.“Get some outside perspective from some of your most trusted partners on what they’re seeing across otherindustries and with your peers in terms of data literacy,” said Baxter-Orr. “Business strategy is data driven.”Look for creativity and critical thinkingData modeling, which is at the core of finance and risk analysis in the digital era, involves creative thinkingand an incisive eye for what matters. To create useful scenarios, you need ideation and data.“Scenario planning requires creativity and discernment,” said Baxter-Orr. “What are the top three or four thingsthat would delay a project, what would the ramifications be, and how can I ensure against them? You’ve got tobe imaginative, but you also can’t prepare for every possibility. You have to be able to envision the three to fivescenarios that matter.”The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan11
Example: Promoting breadthand business acumenDevelop the entry levelCollege recruits with finance degrees were entered in anNew CFOs often find that their workforce is largely tenured inearly career development program designed to developfinance, with limited business acumen. The finance team may notbroader business-finance acumen. Over four years, theyfully understand how the business operates or how it delivers valuerotated to three finance and one or two business roles.to customers. To move toward a more business-focused future state,This fast-tracked a culture of breadth and facilitated newone growth-oriented CFO decided to prioritize the broadening of theexperiences.finance team’s skillset.The goal was to create a deep bench of finance team leadershipDevelop the leadership levelthat had experience in multiple functions within finance and in theThe finance team changed how they evaluatedbusiness at large. Leaders who understand how the business workspromotions. Instead of prioritizing a rapid rise, promisingoverall are better able to recognize the broader implications ofleaders were encouraged to make lateral moves todecisions, including how decisions in one area may impact another.develop breadth before taking the next step up. LeadersTo get there, the team adopted three strategies to promote breadth:with high potential were given the chance to lead adifferent function slightly outside their comfort zone tobroaden their perspective on the business.Work the talent poolDuring talent assessments when merit and bonusdiscussions were taking place across business functions,leaders actively looked for areas where talent could beexchanged to give people opportunities and experiencein other parts of the business. This resulted in greaterbreadth for the individual, as well as infusions of newskills circulating throughout the business.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan12
Anaplan valueHow you restructure your workforce for a transformational finance function can have major costimplications. Anaplan’s Connected Planning capabilities let you work with human resources to exploreoptions, modeling the impact of various hiring strategies on budget, and planning across departments.More important, the extremely detailed and factual view into the business that Anaplan providesenables finance leaders to do their best work, even bringing out new skills they might not be ableto express otherwise.“Anaplan allows you to be creative and challenge the status quo because you have the ability to makenew analytical connections,” said Curbelo. “It liberates talent to do their best. Model builders and usersare exposed to a brand-new landscape of the possible. Access to that world of insight allows financeleaders to ignite change and be a champion of change.”Whether you’re talking to IT, the board, or shareholders, finance leaders need to be able to tell acompelling story and back it up with equally compelling data. Anaplan provides the data that financeleaders need to tell a compelling story, speak with conviction, and explain why they care, why it’simportant, and what the impact is.13
Zone two: CapabilitiesModernization to drive growth takes more than the talent and culture to tackle change. In the age of big data,finance organizations have to stretch themselves outside of their traditional roles to create new connectionsto business data elements. Visibility into the business allows finance leaders to recognize opportunities andforecast outcomes. What are your current data modeling and analysis capabilities? What capabilities do youneed to accomplish your goals? How will you bridge that gap?As new capabilities allow you to improve forecast accuracy and see more clearly where each dollar goes, newprocesses can help you drive efficiencies, capture more sales, and free up cash flow. Greater ability to monitor progress on key initiatives and explore potential setbacks or course corrections mean that you can bringyour product or service to market more quickly, capture more market share, and increase earnings. With depthof insight into the way your business runs comes the confidence to get leaner and more agile in the way youcreate, deliver, and sell your product or service. The scope of the contribution that finance can deliver to thebusiness increases dramatically when you have the tools in place to easily access and analyze business dataand planning across business functions.The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan14
“One way to focus on capabilities that generatevalue is optimizing resources throughautomation. The next level is to create insightto drive growth. That means investmentsin ERP, planning systems, and analyticssupporting business functions.”Ray Curbelo, Finance Line of Business Leader, AnaplanAssessing the finance function’s capabilities that is understood by different functions, and allows us to makeFirst, think about how finance is positioning itself in the business. Doesinformed decisions?the business turn to finance to help craft a strategic path forward or is itseen as a back-office engine for accounting, transactions, and regulatory To uncover the capabilities that you need to drive that strategic impact,ask yourself—and your team—the following questions: What are the strategic goals for the next 3–5 years, how we makemoney, and how we spend money? Do our strategic plans alignto and drive both financial plans and operational plans? How are we going to optimize capital expenditure?What are the methods of collaboration and feedback betweenthe finance team and other functions?compliance? Growth-minded finance leaders build functions that enablethe organization to achieve their business goals.How do we collect and analyze data in a consistent, meaningful way How are longer-term goals and initiatives planned and tracked? Do we use rolling forecasting to understand impact that is longer-term? What systems of alerting are in place to spot divergence and anomalies? Can we evaluate multiple scenarios and tradeoffs? When financial plans don't align to strategic plans, what are themechanisms to evaluate scenarios and trade-offs like mergers andacquisitions, product development, or new go-to-market strategies?The finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan15
Strategies and tactics to build new capabilitiesSecuring investment and commitment to the development of major newcapabilities that overhaul entire systems can be an uphill battle, evenif business leadership agrees that modernization is important. Severalstrategies and tactics can help finance organizations add new capabilitiesoutside of their traditional roles.Technology stack rationalizationOrganizations, especially large ones, have multiple ERPs, CRMs, HR,and marketing systems, in addition to homegrown data sources. Theseredundancies impact finance functions’ ability to get a holistic view ofdata and bring the right insights to the right users at the right times. It alsoincludes having the ability to make informed decisions using data thatprioritize technology stack rationalization to achieve a global view of thebusiness in addition to cost saving and efficiency wins. Rolling out incrementalversions of new technologies, testing, learning, and sharing results as yougo can help generate quick wins, and rally the organization around thebigger vision.Incubate new capabilities graduallyLook for areas where your ideas for transformation can be implemented ona small scale in one well-defined project. Monitor results and collect feedback.If that phase goes well, extend your experiment to one or two other testareas. If feedback is positive, start developing a plan for the investmentneeded to scale the implementation to its full potential.might be outside the organization as well. Growth-minded finance leaders“Test implementations allow you to try newapproaches and learn from them quickly, ruleout what’s not valid, and build the case moreeffectively for things that prove to be valuable,”said Curbelo. “I tested it, this is what I learned,this is the feedback I got, this is the data tosupport it, and let’s talk about why we shouldscale it and what it’s going to take.”Ray Curbelo, Finance Line of Business Leader, AnaplanThe finance leader’s playbook to digital transformationAnaplan16
“If you advertise a beautiful red dress and I drive tothe mall to get it and you don’t have it because yourforecast was off, I’m disappointed. The retail rep isdisappointed because she lost a commission. Now youhave a disappointed employee and a disappointedcustomer. You spent money on advertising and youmade zero dollars. Accurate forecasting is critical.”Three focus areas for modernization:1. Enable comprehensive access to business dataYou need data to discover ways to drive your business, but the datais rarely democratized. In addition to having access to the data, youneed to bring the right insights to the right user at the right time toSara Baxter-Orr, Global Head of CFO Practice, Anaplanhelp them make informed decisions with all necessary data.2. Prioritize analytic tools for insights to drive growth3. Improve your ability to forecast accuratelyThe ability to run business and customer experience analytics is essentialA finance leader is always looking at revenue, but they're alsoto finding new ways to generate shareholder value. The reason is thatsimultaneously managing costs. They need to know the answercompanies can’t drive overall growth through simply selling more. Theyto the following questions:need to focus on what matters to the customer through their experience.A positive customer experience leads to more growth, because if your times to maximize the revenue?customers are happy, (1) they are more likely to buy more, (2) you areless likely to lose them and (3) they could become a marketing asset bysharing their positive ex
The fi nance leader’s playbook to digital transformation Anaplan 4 Carla Moradi, Senior Vice President of Go-To-Market Transformation at Anaplan, has been a CIO responsible for leading digital and business transformations in the retail, health care, insurance, and technology sectors,
