Name: CFO collaborative: Virtual CFO talkback
Uploaded: 2021-12-23
Duration: 11 min 18 s
Description: CFO's discuss the meaningful connections they made with other business leaders in collaborative working groups.

CFO's discuss the meaningful connections they made with other business leaders in collaborative working groups. 

CFO collaborative: Virtual CFO talkback

Leadership

I hope you had some meaningful connections in your working groups. We did in ours for sure. As well as a lot of tremendous experience and insight. Um And now we had four groups, each one had a CFO there who uh started things off and that person's job also is to report back. So we're gonna ask each one just two or three minutes each what happened in your room. And we're gonna start with Robin Cisco, who is CFO of Workday Robin, please? Hi everyone. Thanks Chef. Yeah, we had a really interesting discussion and we touched on a lot of different things. Um it's gonna be hard to synthesize here, but you know, essentially the way we used to use data and then to to model and predict the future isn't working anymore. And so we had a we had a good discussion about how we have to rethink how we use that data, how we apply models to that data, we need to get data um more in sync, you know, around disparate systems, how do we get it more in sync than it was before? How do we get it faster than we were able to get it before? Um And so, you know, the governance around the data, right. All of these have been really significant challenges for everybody. A lot of discussion around the C. F. O C. I. O. Relationship. We had one person in our on our team um who actually had um has the C. I. O reporting to him and the rest of us don't and so, you know, how that relationship needs to be built over time, how key is it to success and, you know, some good tips on how to make sure that you're collaborating between the CFO and the ci organization to get joint objectives done on behalf of the of the company. Um and I think, you know, a lot of folks felt under resourced in in the past, right? And but that now there's a lot more visibility onto it, that we're starting to get some attention uh into these systems that had been considered back office before, and not, you know, sexy enough, right, for investment and are now really viewed as a lot more more critical. Um And I guess the last thought I would, I would uh close with is that there was, you know, um pretty big consensus that things are not going back to the way they were, right, that we will we will not be um predictable again in the future, right? And that we just have to figure out how to live in that unpredictable world, because that's going to be the new normal force going forward. Yeah, it's a great closing point actually acknowledging and embracing a fundamental new reality is really hard, but we gotta do, we all agree, well, that's another subject that we humans are good at it, but we got to do it. Um Okay, thank you very much, Robin, Second Mario Rizzo E VP and CFO at Allstate what happened in your room. Um So uh like Robin, we had a really good uh and pretty robust conversation that that spanned across a number of different areas. So I will try to do it justice in my in my summary, but I thought we had really good dialogue. We started with I think similar to Robin's group. One of the things they talked about this idea of alcohol, it data management, data stewardship and trying to, you know, going to the one of the questions that there was a question that was posed earlier, uh this idea of legacy technology and and um you know, and the barriers that it creates, really trying to to work in collaboration with the C. I. O. And the chief data officer to really clean up what we've got so that you have one version of the truth that data is um is manageable because it's centralized and it's not, you know, you're eliminating the kind of data sprawl that might exist across the enterprise. This idea of creating data lakes while cleaning up data swamps. I thought was a great a great quote from uh from from our group and then this idea that as data becomes more and more available and you give people more access and more freedom to leverage the data to ensure that you're really trying to address the business problem versus you know, having the data be the focal point is right, What is the business issue and business problem trying to solve and how do I best leverage the data in the most effective and efficient way to solve the business issues that I'm I'm trying to deal with. Um So that was that was one of the things we talked about again, this idea that um this is a multi year journey to get from, likely where we're at to where we need to get to and requires collaboration across a number of disciplines across the organization uh to to live into it. Uh We talked about some learnings that we had through the pandemic where particular challenges uh evolved uh whether it was supply chain, uh interactions with sales and being able to dig deeper into the data that existed in understanding backlogs or or particular business problems or issues that emerged during the pandemic that didn't exist before and how we were able to adapt as an organization again, by by partnering with other parts of of the company to address those issues that required uh maybe some new and creative ways of thinking that led us down the path of how we as cfos and our organizations, you know, despite the challenges we might have around uh the the issue of data management and getting our arms around the vastness of the data, the the huge opportunity that exists to get creative with how we think about leveraging the data that's available to us to more effectively understand what's happening in our businesses and also more effectively managing our businesses. So the the idea of as finance people being more and more creative with the opportunity that's ahead of us uh was, was a concept that we we talked about and then we ended with the idea of fully leveraging technology and automation to free up our resources to be able to focus on these kinds of of bigger issues and challenges versus the more routine uh you know, uh tasks that exists that we ought to be able to to uh put technology behind to automate. So a pretty broad conversation. I thought some some really interesting perspective. Yeah, a lot of perspectives and a really rich conversation that sounded like thank you next Vasant Prabhu, who is vice chairman and CFO at Visa. What happened in your room? Okay, well, I'll cover this is quickly since we're running out of time. Uh we talked about some of the other topics you heard from the others centralized versus decentralized access to data. Um and while there's lots of concerns about it, it looks like what people are doing is making data available with the proper governance so that it's good quality data and also with the proper structure so that the data is not going to create a sort of a an issue of dueling data sources with different the different levels of quality and so on. We then talked about too much data and how do you make sure that, you know, with all this data now available, we just don't have just just so much that nobody really knows what to do with it and there was a view that you really have to know what people want and you do have to regulate the the flow of data based on needs as opposed to I have it. So let me make it available. Um there was some question around how transparent have people been through the covid crisis on sharing data. And it sounds like there's definitely been a big push towards greater transparency and more sharing of what is going on ah and some constructive tension between cfos who are concerned about um you know, too much sharing and what it might create in terms of um you know, reggae FD and material, nonpublic information and so on. But by and large there's been, it seemed a real push towards transparency and more sharing. Uh we talked a little bit about whether cybersecurity concerns have gotten in the way of how much data is made available or shared. And it sounded like while it was clearly a consideration, people have all found ways to meet the cybersecurity requirements while also, you know, making sure that data is available where it needs to be and that data is shared in a way that's productive. So that's a quick that's a quick sense. Hopefully I did justice to what the group talked about and very, very helpful. Thank you covered a lot. Finally, Howard Ungerleider President M CFO of tao what happened? Well Jeff, you were there are breakout group. Look, we had a robust discussion and I will cover the ground that everybody else covered. But I do think, you know, we spent a fair amount of time on the the point from the main room before we went in the breakouts on the inflexible legacy technology and that seemed to resonate with a lot of the Cfos in our in our group, whether it's either the technology that was inflexible or non standard work processes and I would say the general consensus of the breakout group was you've got to solve that issue. So you've got to establish a very solid foundation to get to that standardization and allen, I love the quote about sometimes you have to just jam the decision down their throat that, you know, I don't think it was said exactly that way in our in our group. But it really was don't do it, don't pursue that path unless you are willing to make the hard decision to truly standardize. But once you do then you can build on that, you know, and then really get access to all the benefits of information. So let me stop there, Jeff because we're running out of time and howard I can't reveal who said that, but if they want to reveal themselves by raising their hand, they may we're going to give him a few seconds Alan but so far I haven't seen the hand. He's not he's not coming clean. Uh well thank you. Thank you Howard. And it's about time to wrap. Thank you all for being here. Special thanks to our partner in this work day for collaborating with us. We want to see you all back here august 11th three PM for the next virtual CFO collaborative. We'll be focusing on another hot topic for an awful lot of CFOs. The promises and challenges of E. S. G measures we touched on it today. It will be the main topic of our next meeting will be joined by the Bank of America's Ceo Ceo brian Moynihan for now. Thanks until then. Good luck. See you soon.