- Accenture recently put together a research report about the importance of CFOs investing in their teams’ complementary skills along with digital transformations.
Accenture recently put together a research report about the importance of CFOs investing in their teams’ complementary skills along with digital transformations. This report was put together by Accenture Finance & Risk Services senior managing director, senior managing director of Accenture’s Talent & Organization Practice Eva Sage-Gavin, and Accenture partner and managing director Cherene Powell.
Modern financial professionals are advisors to the business who provide growth and profitability insights and they should leave transactional tasks to machines. And in order to provide differentiated intelligence-led services to the business, it requires investing in a comprehensive transformation of the future workforce.
Many CFOs are already investing in digital capabilities at an increasing clip through automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics. However, most are lacking a workforce ready to maximize the value of those tools. This is like buying a high-end racecar while being limited to driving at city speeds.
CFOs need to invest in creating a future-forward finance capability by redefining roles, empowering workers with intelligent technologies, and developing and hiring people with new types of skills. And CFOs would have to work with their Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) to get it done.
Of the CFOs that Accenture surveyed, eight out of 10 (81%) agreed that identifying and targeting areas of new value across the business is a key CFO responsibility. And unlocking this value “requires developing the core skills of tomorrow’s finance team, today—creating a “Human+” workforce that allows humans and machines, collectively, to do what they do best.”
The influx of technology brings a new level of empowerment and engagement rather than marginalizing workers. And finance professionals will be highly valued for uniquely human competencies such as planning, analysis, and data-based decision-making. In these nuanced areas, humans’ emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, creativity, and innovation can help their companies compete more effectively than ever.
New skilling for the post-digital age is the key to creating these new competencies and behaviors. And new personalized learning platforms and artificial intelligence allow companies to scale learning and performance support in near real-time. So CFOs should proactively invest in building skills such as predictive analytics, scenario building and experimentation. All of these skills rely on humans and it is augmented by new technologies and data-based insights so their teams can thrive in a new era of finance work.
Accenture’s research also determined that 67% of workers think it is important to develop their own skills to work with intelligent machines. And 85% of workers would invest their free time to learn new skills.
How should CFOs work with CHROs to make this happen? First, they should establish the vision and strategy for a modern intelligent finance function — which requires a new or refreshed vision of the function. Then they should define the future view of work and how this translates to their workforce and translate the overarching vision to the design of finance work.
And then they need to collaborate in order to future-proof the competency model and people strategy by rewriting the competency model to reflect finance’s new mandate. Together, they will have to consider workforce options whether it is to build, buy, bot, or borrow the right combination for the company to infuse new skills into finance teams.
