How Finance Masters Win With BI & Analytics
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
If there’s one thing the business can’t get enough of, it is insights into how to improve performance and what better way to deliver that than with BI & Analytics (BI&A)? However, in many companies, this is more like a promise of something that will come next year than a real-life experience. While they all have a BI platform it hardly works the way it was sold – it’s not broad enough, too slow and not all the promised sexy visualization has been delivered. On the analytics front, they’re still struggling with too much data and too few data scientists and models to process it. Hence, instead of winning with BI&A the finance function is pushing itself further away from the seat at the table by only showing up with broken promises. Finance Masters do things differently though and that’s what we will explore in this next installment of the Finance Master series.
To do this I’m happy to introduce Christopher Argent as my next co-writer in the series. Chris is a former Financial Controller, finance transformation lead, and now Group BI Strategy and Planning Manager with Vodafone Plc in the UK and owner of one of the more interesting groups on LinkedIn – Generation CFO where we discuss what it takes to be a finance innovator and a tech savvy CFO of the future.
Here’s what you need to do to get started right BI & Analytics
It probably sounds a bit boring but you really need to start small and then upscale things afterward. Otherwise, you will do the big NO NO for finance professionals which is to overpromise and under deliver.
So, below is your step by step plan to win with BI & Analytics.
- Start small and prove that it works: One example could be reducing call center attrition rates and providing insight on what drives call center staff to leave and what helps them to stay. Your aim will be to create actionable insight for HR to advise on an internal improvement initiative to reduce attrition and demonstrate the ROI of this project i.e. the reduction in call center recruitment costs is x times the cost of the BI&A investment and HR initiative.
- Win support in the management team: It is right to sell the potential of BI&A, tell the innovation story, but you must also balance that with the practicalities of delivering this corporate wide asset, make ready key people for the innovation growth journey and ensure your collaborators remain, advocates, as you grow.
- You can’t do it on your own so collaborate: BI&A is a technical specialist field, as much as Tax and Audit, and you will need to form key partnerships with your own IT teams and external BI&A vendors, and manage the balance between demand and delivery and its inherent risks, if you are to exploit the value available to you.
- Understand that data is the asset you need to grow: At the end of the day, it’s all about the data and the asset you need to grow is data, not an expensive suite of the latest BI&A tools.
It’s not until you’ve gone through these four steps that you can start to scale your efforts although that’s not without pitfalls, and we could write a book on that as well!
Finance Masters avoid overpromising and under delivering on BI & Analytics
Once you’ve successfully launched your platform and gotten a few projects under your belt is when the real work starts. That’s because demand for your services will be booming and it is all too easy to start promising a lot of things that you’re not setup to deliver on. BI&A is an evolution, with potential step changes, but it needs to be planned.
Just imagine the difference between the following scenarios for your BI platform.
- A few trial users vs. hundreds or even thousands of users
- A few static reports vs. a full dynamic reporting suite
- A few sets of data vs. a self-service companywide set of data
- A few gigabytes of data vs. thousands of terabytes of data
It’s easy to see that even when you have started, scaling up it is not without challenges and the above will impact the demands on your team and the performance of your system. So, Finance Masters extend their traditional reach and keep IT close to home and make sure to align with them on what the system can deliver and know that investment in BI is not just about spending money on the fancy front ends, but you also need to spend a lot of money (if not most of them) and time on the solution design and back end.
And you’ll find similar challenges with analytics where simply finding the right data and processing the huge volumes for each project takes a lot of effort and you can quickly run out of both processing capacity and specialists to do the processing. Hence, Finance Masters know that they need to keep IT close and prioritize the projects they accept based on their potential value rather than which stakeholder pushes the most. In other words, Finance Masters resist the temptation to go all in at once with BI&A but scale up at a pace that the business can support and the backend can enable.
You're the Master and your input is needed!
The Finance Master series is looking for your input as well. What advice do you have when it comes to setting up a BI suite or running analytics? What good practices would you recommend for someone looking to make an investment in this area? Have you ever experienced that you promised too much to your business stakeholders and couldn’t deliver because you lacked the capacity? We encourage you to add it all in the commentary field and Anders will update the article as they tick in. If you disagree to some of the statements in this article what would you do instead? Finally, if you want to be a part of the Finance Master series then send Anders a message or write in the comment section with a topic you think that you master.
This is the seventh installment in the new Finance Master series and you can read the kick-off article here and previous installments below. Let us know what you think of it by liking, commenting and sharing so we can spread the Finance Master message to all finance professionals. You can follow Anders on Twitter for continuous updates about what’s happening in the finance function.
How Do You Master Travel Expenses?
Don't Fear The Masters Of Internal Audit
How Finance Masters Collect Their Money
Do You Model Off Against The Masters Of Financial Modelling?
Finance Masters's Last Resort To Get Paid
To Pay Or Not To Pay A Finance Masters Dilemma
Anders encourages you to take a tour of his old posts on finance transformation and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really the starting point for the transformation. Finally, you should join the Finance Business Partner Forum where we will continue to discuss this topic.
Finance Transformation Should Be All About… People
How To Help Your CFO Transform Finance
There Is A New Kind Of CFO Needed In Town
The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance
How Finance People Can Be More Successful
The New Career Path For Finance Professionals
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance PMO for Maersk Transport & Logistics and is working with the transformation of Finance and business daily. I have participated in several transformation processes such as a (business) finance transformation at Maersk Line, going Beyond Budgeting at Maersk Drilling and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. I would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.
ACCOUNTANT at AFARIWAA GROUP OF COMPANIES
6 年What about If you set a target(high) for the company in order to move the bar higher and faster but at the end arriving at what you actually want for the organization.
Leader of a global network creating engaged & influential finance professionals & leaders who solve meaningful problems for organisations in this digital age.
7 年Thanks Anders & Christopher for putting this article together, I like the 4 straightforward steps everyone should bear in mind, the point that masters pick on value (not who shouts the loudest) and to avoid overpromising and underdelivering, which is important, but only if it doesn't mean compromising our own behaviour regards speed & cost. For example if we overestimate on cost and come in under we're unnecessarily diverting funds from elsewhere in the business; if we go slower than we could be because we set a cautious timeframe then are we adding as much value as we could be if we're holding the business back longer than necessary? Maybe it's me but I like to set big commitments which can force us to be more resourceful and move the bar higher and faster, than if we had simply underpromised. All that said if we were to underpromise let's do so on quality/functionality, nothing upsets stakeholders more than underdelivering on the final product.
AVP - Data Analytics at Absa Bank Ghana
7 年Good insight into Analytics there! Think point 4 should have been the first.
Manager of Data and Analytics
7 年These are good points for getting started on the BI journey. I would like to assist you with an article about quick wins and pitfalls associated with BI for finance.
Associate Director | Passion for Treasury Technology
7 年Very well written. Step 3 is really very crucial for proper implementation of BI & Analytics. Often business is unable to derive true value addition because of absence of participation of key users during implementation. Indeed big data analytics can only add true value if bonding between a business user and IT consultants are strong enough throughout implementation journey.