Collaboration: The New Corporate Imperative
Today’s tech-savvy CFO sees collaboration as an essential element to their company’s success. Communicating faster and smarter to strengthen teamwork, expediting processes, and improving decision making have driven CFOs to take the lead on establishing best practices to support collaboration. Their advocacy for and curation of collaboration throughout the organization has become a cultural initiative of the same stature as “product innovation” and “outstanding customer service”.
CFOs see one of their responsibilities as acquiring the necessary tools and resources to promote collaboration and invite it to grow and become part of every corporate function and role. Collaborative teams must connect to create and design new ideas, and act in unison to implement and build on these ideas. Collaborative teams must be able to react in real-time to support what they have built, and rely on timely feedback to assess what was done by measuring results against expectations. Executed as a cycle, these steps allow the finance team to make improvements and improve the process with each repeat of the cycle. This is often referred to as Continual Improvement Process (CIP), and collaboration is its foundation.
Technology is one of the most valuable and accessible resources available to facilitate better communication and teamwork across the entire company. The tech-savvy CFO knows that business solutions built on cloud technologies encourage collaboration and are critical to keeping the team focused on executing to expectations. Having those solutions accessible anytime, anywhere is critical, now more than ever.
Tech-savvy CFOs have defined game plans for getting teams to connect, act, support, and assess the work they do together. To connect teams, today’s CFO needs to deploy shared document workspace and teleconferencing solutions. Box.net, Office365 and a number of other cloud-based solutions provide companies with easy-to-deploy, scalable environments in which virtual teams can work together in real-time, independent of geographies and time zones. WebEx, Zoom, and other teleconferencing solutions help to create the essential human connection that fuels the creativity and passion within the team. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions that can be seamlessly integrated to line of business (LOB) applications and provide powerful data analytics and visualization allow business leaders to assess performance and make the most informed decisions possible.
Today, being a tech-savvy CFO is a necessity, and today’s CFO knows that technology-enabled collaboration is the cornerstone of success.
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