What Does Azure Mean to Finance Part 2

The second of a series of posts to explore how the Cloud can support Finance Digital Transformation.

Data.......why does it matter?

The Cloud allows businesses to securely capture, store, and analyse increasing volumes of data from increasingly diverse sources. If you consider the volume of devices you can see in your eye line right now all collecting and compiling data in some capacity you can understand why the digital universe is exploding outwards. Put very simply, those organisations that can extract the right information from their data and make it easily available to people in their organization, at the right time, will create a competitive advantage.

The Cloud is not just storing data cheaply, its about driving value realisation across your organisation.

Often Finance see ERP as a central data source, however there are multiple data sources in any organisation, all offering insights and the potential to support business decisions. The Cloud is an enabler to store all of your data, in a central location and by combining multiple data sets. When you combine data and find a common link, you get genuine insight. When you combine multiple data sources you can support and recommend impactful business decisions by leveraging information across your business. Include external data and you move on a step again.

Spending time ensuring your data has the right structure is critical. From a user point of view, I just want my data to be available and constantly up to date. To be an effective business partner, the less time spent compiling and collecting data and more time spent looking for deep insight and drivers will enable me to influence further. I have more time to consider how the numbers have impacted the business and support decision making.

However, having a really structured and rich data source is not the end of the story. Spending time being reactive to data will only give you so much insight. What about using data to help predict the future and actually be proactive in terms of insight? These pressures for Finance manifest themselves in the ever increasing need to forecast accurately. Azure can bring down barriers to Advanced Analytics such as Machine Learning.

Machine Learning is nothing new, however the ever increasing sources of data, ability to store cheaply and low barriers to entry in terms of technology means this is now widely available. Azure provides a fully managed cloud service that enables you to easily build, deploy, and share predictive analytics solutions. By examining large amounts of data, Machine Learning can detect underlying patterns that will enable future predictions. The more data to feed the model, the more it learns. Consider feeding in multiple years of prior actual results by your key references such as product, geography, CRM data, close rates, exchange history and so on to support your forecast data. With hundreds of built in packages and support for custom code, the barriers of entry to get started are disappearing. Visualise insights through tools such as Power BI to find the underlying benefit of data to your Finance team and business.

Learn more about Azure Machine Learning Studio.