Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference 2019 June 10 - 11 / Washington, D.C.

Join other attendees for breakfast before the day's sessions.

Winners accelerate during economic turns. How do they do this? One thing is clear, it is not by cutting their way to growth. Instead, winners spur innovation/change in strategy/risk taking. To start winning in the turns today, you must ask yourself 3 big questions: Have you increased the discipline with which you allocate resources?; Have you tested your team’s current preparedness to make decisions and act confidently as opportunities or risks quickly materialize?; And have you re-examined key leadership messages and talent positioning to ensure that organizational climate and resourcing supports teams in 2019?

Join this Gartner Zone Theatre session to learn how more than 400 global Finance organizations assess their maturity and create a strategic plan for the development of their teams and processes.

CFO personal effectiveness research suggests that strong relationships with the Board do not start with more time spent with the Board. As Board composition changes – increasing diversity， split of Chairman and CEO changes – this peer discussion will focus on what’s changing about your interactions with the board， what do they want more of and less of from you， and what’s difficult about board engagement in 2019?

An increasing number of clients are contracted to an outsourcer fully or through some sort of hybrid model and their contracts are due for renewal in the next few years. Typically the processes outsourced are mainly back office, but those that are more mature have also given up middle office treasury and accounting processes. With the rise in RPA and other digital solutions, clients frequently question how to structure their future contracts? Do we renew and build in new efficiency incentives? Do we retender with a more digitally focused outsource provider? Join this peer discussion to share insights and learn how other organizations are approaching the topic of outsourcing and automation.

Vendors sure paint a rosy picture as to how artificial intelligence (AI) can help Finance. This session will help you to understand the state of the market for AI and what is likely over the next 3-5 years. It will help you decipher how the market will evolve, rather than solely rely on a vendor dream that may not come true. Most vendor roadmaps are intriguing but are they supported by the data science that will serve up meaningful options for accounting and finance decisions? This innovation will come, but when is it time to pull the trigger?

Today, interventionist politics and more novel, digital growth opportunities have weakened purely financial analytic methods. Comparative advantage is accruing to enterprises whose CFOs are not just able to capture the sensitivities between free cash flow and income statement metrics but also identify when and why those relationships change.

Learn practical approaches to improving your leadership of your finance function and your company, based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 100 CFOs. We'll teach you what relationships exceptional CFOs cultivate, what roles they play, and how they spend their time. We'll pair these findings with best practices for upgrading your leadership style.

The conventional finance approach to embed finance business partners into discrete operating units fails to provide scalable service, timely support and useful expertise for operational decisions. Reorganizing finance’s decision support around decision types rather than business decision makers leads to more financially sound decisions. Given that the expertise model elicits changes to finance’s traditional business partnership, stakeholders might question the effectiveness of this support model. We have developed a set of resources to help you demonstrate that adopting decision expert model makes sense at your organization.

New automation tools are changing how work gets done, and the cutting edge of what is being automated is continuing to be pushed out. Join peers to discuss what finance activities companies have automated and what might be automated next. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

The speed of automation and enhanced technology is creating a significant gap in Finance team’s ability to leverage what is available to its fullest extent – advanced analytics, RPA programming, data scientists. Join peers to discuss which competencies you are focused on and approaches on how to develop the new set of skills required to leverage technological advances. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Leading organizations move faster than their peers on growth opportunities created by insurgent digital business models and new technologies.
Spurred by horror stories of digital disruption, business leaders seek to take advantage of ongoing technological advancements to keep their companies growing aggressively. But despite having invested an average of 12% of company revenue on digital initiatives in 2016, over two-thirds of leaders fear efforts to transform their companies that are not moving quickly enough. This session will focus on how strategists and key senior leaders at large companies can act faster on the opportunities created by digital disruption by accelerating initiatives meant to transform the firm’s digital capabilities; selecting digital business models best-positioned for future growth; and improving visibility into downstream effects of technological advancements.

For most finance functions, RPA is a cost-effective way of improving reporting accuracy and increasing overall departmental productivity. In spite of this, only 19% of controllers and 17% of heads of tax report that they currently use RPA in their day-to-day operations. This adoption rate is set to rise quickly. By 2020, 73% of controllers and 76% of heads of tax expect to fully adopt RPA within their sub-functions. As they prepare to implement and expand the use of RPA in finance, finance leaders will need to identify and prioritize where to deploy robots, how to capture the benefits of the RPA investment, which new skills and competencies to develop within their teams, and understand the main organizational implications of robots and humans working side by side in finance.

Join this session to get candid responses to your data structuring questions including 1) structuring data to accommodate and support big change events (e.g.， reorgs， acquisitions， market entries)， 2) organizing and managing data to allow for product and channel views， and 3) establishing a data management strategy that facilities local control but provides meaningful reporting across our diverse organization.

Analysis on earnings calls in 2019 indicate investors have shifted their focus and are digging into profitability drivers for many companies. Join your peers to discuss whether you are facing shifts in investor questions and how you are managing them. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

As technology costs decrease and digital access among customers and firms increases, digital technology is permeating business, increasingly shaping how companies work and generate value. Pervasive digitalization not only tests companies' business and operating models, but also their leadership models. Learn how to drive enterprise performance in the digital age, the characteristics of the most effective leaders and managers, and actionable steps to strengthen your direct reports' network orientation.

Join other attendees for lunch and take advantage of the opportunity to network and catch up on the day's activities so far.

Drawing on the latest research in positive psychology and personal success, as well as a cornucopia of stories and practical “how to” tips and exercises, Thaler discusses why those who develop and possess the character traits of grit (Guts, Resilience, Initiative and Tenacity) outperform individuals with genius IQ’s, virtuoso talent, unlimited financial resources or a private school education. Individuals with high grit quotient do better in school, work, the playing field, in relationships and life.

This session will provide an overview of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises. It will discuss the inclusion criteria and methodology used to develop the MQ, as well as how to use the MQ to select your appropriate vendor solution. Cloud financials include the general ledger and its subledgers and form the system of record for financial transactions.

Join this Gartner Zone Theater to learn how Gartner has helped numerous clients understand and exploit the individual, team and leadership attributes that drive digital success.

This session will provide an overview of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises. It will discuss the inclusion criteria and methodology used to develop the MQ, as well as how to use the MQ to select your appropriate solution. Product-centric ERP is used for manufacturing, and/or distribution and includes financial management functionality to track costs and produce financial statements.

Go beyond Finance with the CCH Tagetik Finance Transformation Platform, powered by the Analytic Information Hub. Combining granular financial & operational data in one solution, you connect finance and operations with integrated reporting, operational planning, consolidation & close, budgeting & planning, profitability & advanced analytics, predictive forecasting and the foundation for AI.

This session will provide an overview of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis solutions. It will discuss the inclusion criteria and methodology used to develop the MQ, as well as how to use the MQ to select your appropriate vendor solution.

Is your Finance organization future ready? Are you working to get the right people and technology in place to take advantage of the inevitable disruption ahead? Dive into the questions surrounding cloud computing power, AI, blockchain, and more to explain how they will impact day-to-day efficiency, performance optimization, and seeing the future in today’s organizations.

Is your organization held back due to reliance on legacy applications? Learn how The Carlyle Group simplified their CPM landscape by combining three disparate tools into a single platform with OneStream. Find out how they unified financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting and planning, and HR planning in a single application, streamlined processing and significantly reduced their IT costs.

Accelerated technology innovation and unprecedented volumes of data are reshaping the role of finance—a change that’s happening fast, with no signs of slowing down. How can Finance scale and still complete everyday tasks while continuing to bring greater value to this evolving, dynamic market? Join this engaging conversation about what a successful future in finance can look like.

FP&A was set up to provide analysis and drive profitable decision making. But the troubling reality is that FP&A produces analysis that business partners are prone to misinterpreting when making decisions. This misuse of financial analysis can cost companies as much as 1% of revenue per decision. We will discuss how leading FP&A teams shape the utilization of financial analysis by using prototyped models to surface decision makers’ hidden beliefs; delivering greater insight in routine analyses and deliverables; and disruption decision makers’ conventional thinking.

CEOs, boards and investors are concerned by the time it takes companies to develop the skills they need to execute against strategic priorities. For example, new technology such as artificial intelligence is creating a huge opportunity for companies to reduce costs and increase product speed to market but this competitive advantage is lost if the workforce cannot exploit the new technology quickly. To address this challenge, CFOs need to play a different, and more active role in workforce planning. The process of sizing and allocating headcount to specific parts of the business can no longer be managed as an output of the financial planning process. Neither can workforce planning challenges be HR’s problem to solve alone. Today, the CFO’s role in workforce planning is to set the pace at which the company develops the new skills and capabilities that allow it to execute against the strategic plan and gain competitive advantage in a new digital business environment.

Managing cost and inventory risk for businesses with complex products and supply networks requires more than simple metrics and arbitrary targets. This session will provide insights that assist finance leaders to enable and align with supply chain operating roles for the development of realistic goals and effective operating plans that maximize business performance and working capital efficiency.

IT teams are pushing Finance to move financial applications to the cloud faster – only 19% of finance teams have, compared to 40% of HR teams. Join peers to discuss what the migration means to you, as an end user, and how to think about the sequencing and timing of a shift. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Blockchain will transform digital business but is still immature and must evolve before it is scalable across enterprises. How must the underlying blockchain platforms evolve? What are the operational challenges? How can organizations determine if they have an applicable blockchain use case? What are examples of successful blockchain use cases? Learn the answers to these frequently asked questions and more from a Gartner expert.

As more generations move into the workplace and the gig economy expands, and automation replaces human activities, Finance needs to rethink how to staff for the future. Join peers to discuss what future careers might look like. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Organizations are quickly ramping up investments in technologies that provide real-time access to data for decision-makers and enable easy manipulation of that data. As these investments start to come online, finance teams are encountering a host of unexpected questions: How do we get business manager buy-in on financial data that may not align to the real-time operating data that they access on a regular basis? How do we run operating reviews and other business-facing activities without a single version of the truth to organize around? What strategies can we use to create data-driven consensus, when the underlying data is always in flux? Join this peer discussion to share insights and learn how other organizations are approaching the topic of business decision support in a world of always-on information.

The advances in technology that are ready to be applied to Finance， also require a new skill set. This peer discussion will focus on where are you experimenting with roles that previously didn’t exist in finance – data scientists， digital/automation gurus， scrum leaders. It will also touch on where and how are you pushing your team to abandon traditional finance behaviors and take on new types of work.

Join this Gartner Zone Theater to learn how Gartner has helped organizations choose where to place their digital bets in data, automation and analytics.

Jesse channels his book Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet and shares lessons learned during his month of living and extreme fitness training with a Navy SEAL to illustrate the importance of increasing your mental toughness meter.

Robotics that are designed to improve accuracy and audit trails for finance and compliance are in high demand. Research indicates that companies have an immediate need for these products. Generally speaking, however, only large organizations have the luxury of purchasing robotic processes that they can host, program, and employ themselves. Is there a way forward for the underserved middle market?

Join other attendees for breakfast before the day's sessions.

Join four CFOs who will share their experiences and lessons that helped them get ahead of the competition and win in the turns.

This session will explore how powerful technologies like AI are using data more effectively to predict and enhance decision making. See how Prophix is humanizing experiences and interactions with their software leveraging cloud technologies like; natural language processing, machine learning for anomaly detection and more.

Corporate culture drives the digital agenda. As digital innovations modernize the workplace, the expectation of the CFO also transforms. Join Host Analytics CFO Dan Fletcher to learn how today's CFOs have the opportunity to develop efficient processes and modern business practices, increase company performance, and drive a team culture that supports productive, happy employees.

CFO turnover is on the rise. What’s more CFO performance and company performance are inextricably linked – CFOs with higher TSR relative to industry peers during their tenure are more likely to leave the CFO role for CEO or “CEO in waiting” positions. What is the next role for CFOs? What does the path from CFO to CEO look like? Are there other paths (e.g.， to BU leader) that CFOs are trying to engineer， or is CFO the destination role? Join this peer discussion to discuss how CFOs are thinking about their career and setting themselves up to be successful in the next role.

Alignment between finance and supply chain to improve cost and inventory performance requires a common description of the objective; identification of constraints and risks; and performance measurement that supports informed operating decisions. Join this peer discussion to identify common alignment barriers and share approaches that have enabled improvement.

Given the complexity of the current macro, political, geo climate, what – if any – shifts are you making to your SG&A cost structure? Join your peers to discuss what SG&A costs you would (or have) cut first if you needed to and what strategies are you using to make sure you’re not cutting too far? Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

This session will provide best practices in selection and implementation of Cloud financial applications. It will discuss trends in three markets: Core Financials, FP&A and Financial Close. These markets are changing rapidly and have usurped most of their on premise counterparts. Additionally, innovations in digital technologies will drive the next chapter in Cloud migration for many companies.

The cost of your office space could be low-hanging fruit on the balance sheet. With a rise in telecommuting and creative workplace configurations, it's possible to reduce cost with changes to your office portfolio. What are my options when thinking about consolidating the office portfolio? What are the current trends in space design that encourage proper utilization of the space I keep? How do I incorporate new workplace options into my portfolio? Learn the answers to these frequently asked questions and more from a Gartner expert.

Learn practical approaches to improving your leadership of your finance function and your company, based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 100 CFOs. We'll teach you what relationships exceptional CFOs cultivate, what roles they play, and how they spend their time. We'll pair these findings with best practices for upgrading your leadership style.

In a competitive labor market, finance leaders are struggling to attract and retain employees with specialized and differentiated skills.
Finance leaders who understand the employee value proposition (EVP) attributes that drive recruitment and cause attrition differentiate their function from competitors, reducing the compensation premium needed to hire a prospective job candidate by 50%.

The conventional finance approach to embed finance business partners into discrete operating units fails to provide scalable service, timely support and useful expertise for operational decisions. Reorganizing finance’s decision support around decision types rather than business decision makers leads to more financially sound decisions. Given that the expertise model elicits changes to finance’s traditional business partnership, stakeholders might question the effectiveness of this support model. We have developed a set of resources to help you demonstrate that adopting decision expert model makes sense at your organization.

At the typical company growth investments are twice as likely to miss their initial business case expectations as they are to exceed them. To address this， most Finance teams focus on practices aimed at reducing the likelihood of an investment missing its expectations. However， companies with the best growth investment returns don’t have a materially lower percent of investments that fail in this way. Instead， Finance teams at these companies focus on getting a larger percentage of their investments to exceed rather than just meet their initial expectations. Join this session to learn the key strategies the best Finance teams use cultivate growth investment over-performance.

ERP is not what it was 20 years ago. A fourth era of ERP is emerging as postmodern ERP evolves to a necessary foundation to support changing methods of working and delivering business capabilities. ERP vendors are investing in emerging technologies. CFOs and CIOs must learn how to leverage ERP investments to take advantage of technology advancements to optimize value and business outcomes.

Join other attendees for lunch and take advantage of the opportunity to network and catch up on the day's activities so far.

Join this Gartner Zone Theatre session to learn how Gartner’s on-demand benchmarks and custom reports can lead to smarter budgeting, resource allocation, and decision-making.

This session will provide an overview of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close solutions. It will discuss the inclusion criteria and methodology used to develop the MQ, as well as how to use the MQ to select your appropriate vendor solution. Solutions within this market category include financial consolidation, financial reporting, reconciliations/close management and intercompany transfers.

Learn three habits that elite cost cutting CFOs employ during economic turns.

For most finance functions, RPA is a cost-effective way of improving reporting accuracy and increasing overall departmental productivity. In spite of this, only 19% of controllers and 17% of heads of tax report that they currently use RPA in their day-to-day operations. This adoption rate is set to rise quickly. By 2020, 73% of controllers and 76% of heads of tax expect to fully adopt RPA within their sub-functions. As they prepare to implement and expand the use of RPA in finance, finance leade rs will need to identify and prioritize where to deploy robots, how to capture the benefits of the RPA investment, which new skills and competencies to develop within their teams, and understand the main organizational implications of robots and humans working side by side in finance.

Can analytic activities be moved into a center of excellence and take out of the business? Join your peers to discuss what finance activities companies have recently moved to centers of excellence and what might be next. Meetups are networking sessions that allow you to connect with a small group of peers, without Gartner facilitation, in the spirit of solving business problems together. Please make every effort to attend your Meetup as your peers will be looking forward to meeting with you.

Learn about the types of value shared services can contribute to the business and how Finance can maximize the value shared services delivers.

Cybersecurity is a frequently used but often misunderstood term. Historically, markets have used cybersecurity synonymously with IT security, internet security and even physical security management. But cybersecurity’s focus is on protecting information across all domains, including finance. This is not an IT issue alone. Learn the answers to frequently asked questions in this space and more from a Gartner expert.

Although， the decentralization of decisions and democratization of data have made the enterprise data-rich， decision making continues to be information poor. Lack of understanding about the value and breadth of data， the housing of data on disparate systems， and the sheer effort in organizing the data for analysis， mean that business leaders are not using the best data they should be using for planning， performance management， and decision making. Join this peer discussion facilitated by a Gartner expert to discuss how you are building data management strategies that connect disparate data across the organization to promote a holistic understanding of business performance and associated actions that business leaders need to take.

Join this Gartner Zone Theater to learn how Gartner has helped numerous clients understand and exploit the individual, team and leadership attributes that drive digital success.