GARTNER, INC.
We are bringing you news and highlights from the
Below is a collection of key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.
On Day 2 of the conference we are looking at how CFOs can redesign their finance function using 6 questions, the role of behavioral science in driving successful finance transformation, ERP as the catalyst for finance transformation, and how to take charge of data to make financial planning software AI ready.
Key Announcements
Keynote Press Release: Gartner Says CFOs Must Address Four Enterprise AI Stalls
Day Two Press Release: Gartner Says CFOs Must Treat Cybersecurity as a
6 Questions To Design The 'Perfect' Finance Function
Presented by
CFOs find themselves navigating a difficult 'deadweight' economy characterized by tepid demand growth, stubbornly high costs and constrained access to capital. The majority of CFOs are reacting by prioritizing improvements to the finance function's strategy and design. In this session
Key Takeaways
There are three main reasons that CFOs want to redesign their functions. First, to make the function more scalable and prevent the friction of a poorly designed organization.
Second, to identify and define the new roles, skills and responsibilities required in a digital finance function.
Third, to embed new more collaborative approaches to work, behaviors, team customs and adopt methods such as lean and agile.
To address these drivers for function redesign, CFOs need to ask themselves and their teams each of the six questions in the order listed in the accompanying slide.
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The Role of Behavioral Science in Driving Successful Finance Transformation
Presented by Marco D'Ascoli, Director Analyst
With approximately 70% of finance transformation initiatives producing less impact than anticipated, finance leaders are often left wondering where things are going wrong. In this session Marco D'Ascoli, Director Analyst at Gartner, explored how a better understanding of irrational behaviors and behavioral science can help keep finance transformation on track.
Key Takeaways
Humans tend to think irrationally, and this can be a major problem for finance transformation initiatives.
Irrationality is very often predictable, and the behaviors leading from it can be changed or mitigated.
Irrational behaviors are caused by cognitive biases: ways of understanding facts and events based on personal beliefs and experiences.
Four biases have the biggest impact on finance transformation: anchoring bias, loss aversion, status quo bias, and overconfidence.
Finance leaders should build a shortlist of behavioral science tactics to address these four cognitive biases and trial them in their finance transformation efforts.
ERP- The Catalyst for Finance Transformation
Presented by
The idea that an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system could be a catalyst for finance transformation may seem counterintuitive to many finance leaders who often find such platforms act as a barrier to transformation. In this session,
Key Takeaways
Approximately 8 in 10 finance functions currently plan upgrades to their ERP platform, with cloud ERP currently the most valued technology for finance functionst, outperforming AI, GenAI and machine learning.
ERP deployments face three common challenges: Inflated promises, claiming it to be all things to all functions, that are not met and lead to frustration; inherent inflexibility that doesn't cope well with disruption and rapidly changing business demands; and opaque ownership of the platform across finance and IT.
Moving to cloud ERP provides an opportunity to reset the ERP value story and mitigate the difficulties leading from inflated expectations, and to organize for continuous evolution and value.
Finance leaders should start with the business outcomes they want from an ERP deployment, identify the capabilities that the finance function will need to realize those outcomes, and then agree what capabilities the ERP will deliver and source accordingly.
Finance leaders should encourage agile deployments in the ERP to be able to cope with business disruption or changing strategies.
Take Charge of Data to Make Financial Planning Software AI/ML-Ready
Presented by
Seventy five percent of finance leaders aren't satisfied with their function's progress towards advanced analytics, 62% encounter major obstacles to data-enhanced planning, and 83% expect investment to increase in the near term. In this session
Key Takeaways
Finance leaders pursuing AI/ML and advanced analytics tend to focus too much on the distant promise of what technology might achieve and not enough on the business outcomes they want to see in their organization.
This is because it is more engaging: planning out technology, looking at vendor demos and visualizing the world of what could be, asking, 'What are other finance functions doing with this technology?'
Finance leaders should focus on the business outcomes (problems) that are critical and then finding the technology to deliver them.
Once the important business problems have been defined, finance is in a far better position to identify the data requirements for solving those problems.
A common misconception that tends to delay these kinds of initiatives is that the function will need to acquire more technology-based knowledge, skills and behaviors. Most of the required skills already exist to some extent in FP&A.
That's a wrap for
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