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.

For many organizations, the strategy gap is a major obstacle that systematically prevents businesses from truly maximizing their Strategic Planning efforts and sustainably creating value for their organization. 

I have been thinking long and hard about what I need to do to stay relevant as a finance professional for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years, and after hours of research I want to share my thoughts and views on the skills future finance professionals will need in this ever-changing technology driven era.

A paradox which continues to puzzle me is how chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers can be aware that their managerial accounting data is flawed and misleading, yet not take action to do anything about it.

We live in a world of uncertainty. But in that uncertainty lies a great deal of opportunity for those organisations capable of successfully executing a winning plan.