This is the first part of a three-part series on the business value that data science and analytics can provide to enterprises.

Every large organization in the world today, from Apple to P&G and from Ford to Goldman Sachs has a dedicated Financial Planning & Analysis team with bespectacled finance professionals claiming to be “more than mere accountants” or even “value-adding business partners”. What is FP&A and why has it become arguably the most important function in a company’s finance organization?

Looking to leverage your FP&A team into strategic partnership? One question to ask is how does FP&A drive strategic partnership & value? Strong FP&A teams have a neutral perspective and bring data driven decision making into the partnership.

The concept of business partnering is more than two decades old and till now employees, at all levels, have not fully understood the fundamental point of Business Partnering roles. Even the companies which consider themselves ahead of the curve on implementing business partnering, have only thought of the functional and operational elements of business partnering role.

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Centers of Excellence (CoEs) are an increasingly potent solution to a very timely challenge: How to improve the analytics and decision support capabilities of FP&A, when finance is under continued pressure to do more with less.

The 21st century has allowed us to communicate in a number of effective and innovative ways. Email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Tinder, Hashtags, the list goes on and on in relation to forms of communication which are anything but the simple and most basic form of communication; conversation.