In July 2017, I presented at the 2017 AICPA FP&A Conference in Las Vegas over AI (Artificial Intelligence) & machine Learning impact on FP&A. The session received great feedback from attendees and other speakers. So, I wanted to share an article summarizing the presentations main points. The goal of this article is to provide insights into the impact AI & machine learning will have on people, processes and technologies in FP&A. Hope you enjoy!

In July 2017, I facilitated 5 meetings of the International FP&A Board in Asia and Australia. It was an amazing journey to 3 countries, 5 cities, and two continents. I was on the road for one month and met so many passionate FP&A professionals in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Every meeting was a great success.

In the period from 2001 to 2006, the Retail division of Swiss Post transformed itself from a public service company into a business driven sales organization. Crucial drivers of change were, on the one hand, the adaptation of the steering systems up to the final implementation of a "Beyond Budgeting" philosophy and, on the other hand, a humanistic attitude of management and finance department against all employees. The success was amazing: The division succeeded in increasing the sales of new retail products from 0 to over 400 million CHF, optimizing the bottom line by more than 100 million CHF or more than 5 percentage points and becoming the first state-owned company in Switzerland to win the EFQM- Award for Business Excellence.

So, you are a C-suite executive, Vice President, Director, Manager, Senior, or Staff financial professional and you just had a high potential and high-performance team member or members move on to greener pastures. Or you aspire to be a high potential and high-performance employee and looking for success factors to take your game to the next level. Well, look no further than this post.  

I’d like to claim that I am not easily annoyed….but that would be untrue. And one of the things that are guaranteed to irritate me is glib statements from people who claim to be experts – particularly if it is part of an act to get people to buy something.

I recently had the honor of moderating a global webinar focused on how Finance leaders can leverage FP&A business partnering to impact performance across the enterprise. The featured speakers delivered nothing short of compelling experiences and insights.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. There are numerous articles being written, nowadays, on the plight of several professions — lawyers, financial advisors, accountants, etc., because of robo-lawyers, robo-advisors, and robo-accountants.

Business users want the power of analytics – but analytics can only be as good as the data being analysed. A survey by TDWI has revealed best practices to improve data preparation, finding 76% of businesses hope to increase data-driven decision making and 37% are currently unequipped to do so. 

“A good sketch is better than a long speech…” a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. Companies are collecting, organising, storing, and analysing data from hundreds of sources, and the volume is increasing exponentially. But this data is only relevant if it can be used to drive outcomes and make timely business decisions. So it is essential to you can understand and evaluate the data quickly, and this is where data visualisation comes in.

To create value from data, you do need a big data strategy – right? Well, actually, probably not.  According to Gartner, the ‘all-encompassing data strategy’ fails around 60% of the time.  In fact, Gartner have even stopped publishing a Big Data ‘Hype Cycle’ (their measure of maturity and adoption of technologies).