As the future of finance involves technology, the need for finance-IT alignment continues to be in the spotlight.
“I think for far too long, if you start talking about finance and technology to finance people, they will shut down,” said Doug Schosser, EVP and chief accounting officer at KeyCorp. On Tuesday, Schosser participated in a panel session during Workday’s (sponsor of CFO Daily) annual customer event in Orlando this week.
“We can’t do that anymore,” Schosser said. “We have to be part of this evolution. We have to be comfortable that we can apply the depth of knowledge we have about controls and processes to a technology function. And together with IT, we can actually make it better. We can make it faster. And we can make it more comprehensive.”
Finance leaders are noting the shift of financial services from being a traditional business support function to becoming central to value creation. This includes being front and center in processes like digital transformation and implementing enterprise-wide management cloud solutions for data. And that means working with the CIO, whose role is also changing.
“From my perspective, you have to understand the business in ways that you didn’t have to before to be able to translate and get a little further on the finance side,” panelist Stacy Carron, CIO at Stout, a global investment bank and advisory firm, said. “It’s no longer IT’s sole responsibility as to whether a project is successful or not. We have a lot more stakeholders that are interested in what’s happening and looking for perspective and insight earlier.”
