Solution Brief
The Data-Driven CFO
Harnessing Your Data for Competitive Advantage
Overview
CFO charters have grown over the last few years. “Being a CFO is becoming a bigger
and bigger role today.” It is not just about profit and loss, expense management, or even
budgetary control. Today’s CFOs must be more strategic, and ensure better alignment
with strategic business imperatives. This means today’s CFO relies on data not only for
financial reporting but also for managerial reporting. Unfortunately, traditional approaches
to integrating and managing data get in the way of the CFOs new and expanded role.
The Informatica Intelligent Data Platform is a break-through data platform that can help the
CFOs get a continuous flow of trusted data, regardless of source or technology.
The CFO Requirements for Great Data
CFOs Need Trustworthy Data
CFOs worry about data integrity. In the data integration business, we refer to this as
veracity of data. Veracity refers to the quality or cleanliness of data and how certain
one is that their data is indeed accurate.1 91% of CFOs in a recent survey said that they
want to improve the quality of financial and performance insight obtained from the data
they produce. An amazing “51% of CFO survey respondents in this same survey said
that collecting, storing, and retrieving financial and performance data at their company
is primarily a manual and/or spreadsheet-based exercise”2. In our interviews, one CFO
bluntly shared how poor data impacts CFOs: “If the systems suck, then you cannot trust the
numbers when you get them.”
CFOs Need Data Faster
CFOs we talked to said data integration is a big issue for them. “What we need is the
integration of the right systems to provide the right information so we can manage and
make decisions at the right time.” A key element of this is being able to inspect the books
and monitor business performance more frequently. To do this, however, involves making
systems talk to one another and automating the rollup of the charter of accounts. The latter
enables consolidated financials earlier in the cycle. This means financial leadership can get
a peek into revenue and expenses earlier and use this knowledge to take action and drive
better predictability.
Enabling Business Decision Makers to Make Better Decisions
CFOs need to manage upward with information. For this reason, they are focusing on
information that enables decision makers to make better decisions. CFOs also ask for more
complete business metrics. “It is a finance objective, because finance is responsible for
business metrics and evaluating gaps in business performance”.
1
“Data Integration for Dummies”, John Wiley and Sons, 2014, page 16
2
The Intelligent Finance Organization, KPMG, page 16
Data Security is Critical
• A single and standardized data infrastructure
While CFOs say they are not directly responsible
for the security of IT systems, the security of data is
increasingly important to them. CFOs say they must
be able to trust the network and applications and
trust that the right people have access. Increasingly,
auditors are making inspection of these areas a
priority. This CFO said, “this is a whole new direction
for us. Target scared a lot of folks and was in many
respects a watershed event.”
Designing for Great Data
The challenge for the CFO today in harnessing data
is that the landscape of data sources has drastically
changed over the last 10 years. The mechanisms
for connecting data sources for the most part have
not. Many organizations rely heavily on IT experts,
hand coding or heavy collection of tools. The result is
inconsistent data quality, critical resource constraints
in IT, and poor responsiveness when new questions
arise and often shadow IT efforts within the CFO
organization to compensate.
A data-first thinking is required to elevate data
to a strategic asset that it needs to be. Your data
landscape needs to be modeled to fit your business
requirements and not simply exist as the connection
point between applications. Your selected data
platform should aim to deliver the following:
between all applications that can continuously
deliver data that is clean, safe and connected to all
the places that need it.
• A platform that is self-learning and optimizing and
empowers users to easily find available data and
can guide them in shaping and enriching that data
to fit new and changing business purpose.
The Informatica Intelligent Data Platform
The Informatica® Intelligent Data Platform makes
financial organizations the masters of the data that
they produce by enabling them to automate and
control the process of creating timely, trustworthy
data for analysis.
The Intelligent Data Platform starts by creating data
which is clean, safe, and connected. In contrast to
other solutions, obtaining clean data is managed by
the finance rather than someone in IT. To be clear, the
finance organization creates and manages all data
cleansing rules. As a result, the finance organization
can trust the data produced from financial or
business systems knowing that rule exceptions are
automatically sent to the appropriate finance leader
for remediation. “Safe” data means that data
governance rules are created once at the enterprise
level. These systematically limit access to financial
and business data and mitigate business risk.
Data-Fueled Applications
Intelligent Data Platform
Data Intelligence
Metadata meets Machine Learning
Data Infrastructure
Clean, Safe and Connected Data
Virtual Data Machine
Applications and Data Sources
Figure 1. Intelligent Data Platform
“Connected” means that the data is automatically put
together into a consolidated general ledger. This puts
data in the right format for integrative analysis.
The foundation of the Intelligent Data Platform is
Vibe™. Vibe reduces the cost of building integration
and quality rules by allowing them to be built once
and deployed anywhere, regardless of the underlying
technology and where that technology is located—
on premise or in the cloud. This means that the
investment in data quality rules and interconnect is
protected regardless of where the applications reside.
The top layer of the Intelligent Data Platform is the
data intelligence layer. This layer makes it easier to
access to the right data and guides financial and
business users in shaping and enriching financial and
business data for analysis purposes. For example, it
enables users to discover potential data sources and
to inter-relate data from different sources as well as
evaluate data relationships before commissioning
an IT project. This layer also includes the ability
to automatically detect anomalies and create a
set of responses via preprogrammed rules. This is
particular relevant for creating financial compliance
Why does the Intelligent Data Platform Mean
to Finance Organizations?
The Intelligent Data Platform better connects CFOs to
the data so they need act more strategically.
By ensuring the performance data that a financial or
IT organizations produces is neither stale nor
out-of-date, CFOs can help their business partners
drive more predictable results. At the same time, it
can enable better control of expenditures against
budgets. More timely information also enables
financial teams to better limit business risk around
compliance and regulatory issues by being able
to discerning potential issues sooner. And finally,
by getting more active measures of business
performance faster, this allows CFOs to help their
business counterparts drive business performance as
well improve business synergies.
or regulatory alerts.
Improve Confidence
Getting
Numbers
Right
Drive
Business
Synergies
Business
Performance
Informatica
Intelligent
Data Platform
Compliance
and
Regulatory
Limit Business Risk
Figure 2. Today’s CFO Role
Control
Against
Budgets
Deliver
Predictable
Results
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation
(Nasdaq:INFA) is. Organizations
around the world rely on
Informatica to realize their
information potential and drive top
business imperatives. Informatica
Vibe, the industry’s first and only
embeddable virtual data machine
(VDM), powers the unique “Map
Once. Deploy Anywhere.”
capabilities of the Informatica
Platform. Worldwide, over 5,000
enterprises depend on Informatica
to fully leverage their information
assets from devices to mobile to
social to big data residing onpremises, in the Cloud and
across social networks.
For more information, call
+1 650-385-5000 (1-800653-3871 in the U.S.), or
visit www.informatica.com.
Connect with Informatica at
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InformaticaCorporation, http://
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InformaticaCorp.
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