The only thing that is permanent is change itself. One needs to keep evolving and reinventing oneself to stay abreast of the modern trends and stay competitive in today’s market. CFOs are no exception to the rule either.

Technology is altering the way financial operations take place. Below is a list of modern technologies that will boost modern CFO skills & competencies and make a positive impact on business decisions and processes that all CFOs must be aware of.

When it comes to technological advancements, SAP is never far behind. Below is a touchdown on the latest technological advancements in SAP and other major players around the world.

Types of technologies

• The ones that enable innovations
• Disruptive innovations

The first category consists of finance technologies that are already changing and impacting financial operations around the world. These innovations improve the way business is being done. Mobility, in-memory computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) belong to this category. Such innovations help finance organisations achieve lower ownership cost and improved performance from the systems.

Disruptive technologies are the ones that involve changing the traditional business processes from the inside-out. These technologies have the capability to alter business processes drastically in the years to come. Some of these technologies are social media, crowdsourcing, big data and cognitive and predictive analytics.

Advantages of Enabling Technologies

1. The SaaS model: This can help CFOs with cost reduction and an increased overall efficiency. It enables CFOs to migrate a part of the IT cost from capital expenditure to operational expenses.
2. Mobility: When mobility is leveraged properly, it can extend the financial capabilities to a greater extent in the organisation. Through mobility, business finance can boost the business’s need for remote enablement and provide crisp analytics for the decision support system.
3. Visualisation: This is also a powerful technique that provides finance with the ability to uncover hidden insights and enhance finance’s communication and partnership abilities with business. The biggest USP of visualisation is the language in which the data is presented. The language is easily comprehended and consumed by business.

Advantages of Disruptive and Emerging Technologies

1. Crowdsourcing and Social Media- Social media are put down for being a platform for casting outrage and misdirected anger. However, they have many positive aspects as well. Crowdsourcing and social media can bring external and internal perspectives from “wisdom of the crowds” to the traditional finance capabilities and processes. Content can be collected and analysed from networking platforms and collaboration, information-sharing can be facilitated by finance, increase collaboration in analysis and reporting and give an “outside view” of the organisation’s outcomes to the business partners.
2. Predictive analytics: using this technique, finance can use historical data correlations and trends and employ them for modelling of the various potential outcomes along with varying risks. It helps finance to predict results by making models of the probable outcomes considering real-time variables and inputs.
3. Cognitive analytics: This is quite similar to the predictive analytics technique. It incorporates technologies such as natural language processing and in-machine learning to improve hypotheses identification.
4. Big data: This technology is already bringing about transformative changes and major improvement in the supply chain, customer interactions and operations in different organisations.

While adapting to these technologies may seem like an uphill task for business professionals who are set in their ways. It is certainly the need of the hour. One important thing that technology CFOs should bear in mind is that perfect results are not achieved on the first day itself but by continuously trying out new approaches that eventually lead to improved processes and business performance.

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