Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference Sydney: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference 2024, taking place this week in Sydney, Australia. Below is a collection of key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 1 of the conference we are looking at how to track enterprise technology spend; storytelling with modern analytics and the finance transformation strategy consulting market.

• Gartner Survey Shows a Third of CFOs Involved in Developing Enterprise GenAI Strategy

Presented by Sid Sahoo, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

IT and other technology spend across the enterprise is not well enough understood by finance leaders. In this session, Sid Sahoo, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explained ways to assess what enterprise technology spend finance leaders should be tracking and why.

• “Failing to track technology at an enterprise level has the effect of creating opacity and silos that allow value killers to thrive.”
• “If the business makes decisions on applications or systems without consulting IT this can lead to much higher integration costs and increased risk.”
• “A holistic view of technology spend is needed in the enterprise to avoid the duplicative and hidden costs of silos, to ensure that ownership and accountability for projects is clear and business cases include all real world costs.”
• “There is no standard  definition for enterprise-wide technology spend, like there is for traditional IT spend, so CFOs should take the lead in defining what technology does, and does not, need to be tracked and governed at the enterprise level.”
• “Work across the C-suite to co-create digital governance that is optimized for speed, focused on the risks and customer experience, and is integrated throughout the customer journey.”
• “The CFO’s role in such a shared governance structure is to drive enterprise-wide tech spend strategy. The CIO should partner with the CFO in tracking the spend. CIOs also should influence the right tech investments, as well as be accountable for most IT costs.”

Presented by Clement Christensen, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

When presenting data, the best chances of the audience retaining and acting on that information come from telling a story with it. But many companies are having issues with data storytelling because the usual methods don’t work that well with new self-service tools. In this session, Clement Christensen, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explained how leading organizations are doing things differently in the digital era.

• “Finance often makes the mistake of trying to tell linear stories with non-linear tools.”
  
• “Storytelling in a self-service environment is more akin to a ‘choose your own adventure’ (CYOA) story than a traditional book.”
• “CYOA stories can apply graph analytics and decision intelligence to better direct the audience in a self-service environment.”
• “There are two essential steps to telling a good CYOA story. First, you need to structure narrative clusters so the story remains coherent as you explore it. Second, design narrative chains to guide the audience down a path that leads to an intuitive conclusion.”
• “In data storytelling language: structure data relationships and design data story plotlines that make sense to the readers.” 
• “Graph analytics and decision intelligence are essential finance capabilities to do this: graph analytics reveal the narrative clusters of data points and the relationships between them; decision intelligence is how to start to better understand the intuition of the readers.”

Presented by Geraldine Garaud, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

CFOs often seek out consultancy to plan strategies and roadmaps across many different business-aligned, forward-looking initiatives. In this session, Geraldine Garaud, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, looked at how this market is evolving.

• “It’s critical to distinguish between, and separate, finance transformation strategy consulting support evaluations from finance transformation execution support evaluations.”
  
• “To execute successful finance transformations, strategy must come first.”
  
• “Strategy consulting, typically executed in a 12-week period, differs from execution consulting in that it requires cross-pillar (as opposed to niche) acumen and is aligned to critical business (as opposed to project) outcomes.”
  
• “Providers in this market are developing several emerging capabilities, such as capability investments, delivery solutions and subject matter expertise expansion to help CFOs plan finance transformation better.”
  
• “CFOs surveying this market should look for service providers’ demonstrated ability to deliver tailored recommendations in shorter time frames through more flexible agreements.”
  

Tune back in tomorrow for more updates from the conference.