Data Agility Is The New Competitive Advantage For Finance

This article is sponsored by Konsolidator, a listed Danish company, that makes financial consolidation and reporting simple through its cloud-based solution. You can read more about how Konsolidator helps small- and midsized enterprises increase their data agility here.

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Think a year back in time and ask yourself if you were happy with your systems, processes, and data accessibility? Most would probably say they were reasonably happy yet still had plans to improve. BOOM! Then the pandemic hit and there was ZERO visibility seeing companies increasing the frequency of their reporting significantly. 

Unfortunately, many experienced that their systems were not set up for this kind of frequency and data was not readily available. What do you do? Turn to Excel and work 80 hours per week to keep things afloat. This is not sustainable, of course, and while there is light ahead in the tunnel on the pandemic, Finance clearly needs to change things up to be in better shape for the Next Normal! The answer is called “Data Agility” and that is what we are going to explore in this article… 

What is Data Agility and what does it mean for Finance? 

In simple terms “Data Agility” is when you have access to the data you need at the speed of your decision-making. That means if you need to make fast and frequent decisions like during the early days of the pandemic data agility becomes critical. If you make few decisions every year yet far-reaching data agility might not be what is most important to you. 

For most companies, though data agility only increases its importance as time passes since the world moves faster and faster and the pandemic gave us a hard-earned lesson on that. There are multiple factors underlining this including... 

• Uncertainty about the future meaning we need to revise forecasts often and make multiple what-if scenarios about what could potentially happen
• Remote working meaning that access to data must be seamless from anywhere and be well-structured in a data warehouse rather than in locally saved spreadsheets
• Communication being supported by valid, safe, and fast data to promote data-driven decision-making 

Finance needs to deliver on data agility and must spearhead the development based on the learnings from the pandemic. One key point will be to automate as many processes as possible. This increases the speed of the production of structured data and also reduces errors. In addition, it is likely a utopia to think we will get rid of Excel in our financial processes yet the more structured we can make the data the more easily accessible it will be to anyone who is using it. 

It is a win-win situation 

Creating data agility will be a win-win for all parties. Decision-makers will have data available for all applicable decision-horizons even if it means several times per day. Finance, if embracing automation and structure, will be able to deliver many more insights at a much lighter workload. In fact, it will even free up time to take part in the decision-making process rather than just being supportive data jockeys. 

Not only is this a win for everyone inside the company but it will also be a competitive advantage. Simply being able to make decisions faster and based on more valid data should on average lead to relatively better decisions compared to your competitors. Sure, it might require some investments in tools and process mining, but it will be well spent to obtain true data agility! 

How agile is your company’s data? Did you experience during the pandemic that data was not as easily accessible as you thought? What are you doing now to increase data agility and what would it be worth for your company to have it? These and more questions Finance should be able to answer if we want to elevate our influence in the company’s overall decision-making. Are you able to answer them?

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 9,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger on LinkedIn with 55.000+ followers.