The success or failure of a transformation ultimately comes down a clarity of vision and robust execution strategy targeted at improving the capabilities, behaviours and performance of the Finance team. For Finance to be valued they need to play the role of a coach rather than a scorekeeper. Working in partnership with the business towards driving sustainable success through:
However, without a clear vision of what exactly needs to change and how to effectively transform, business satisfaction will continue to elude Finance.
There is no one-size fits all approach to change as each Finance team has their unique set of needs and challenges as well as differing levels of digital maturity. For those who are faced with years, perhaps decades, of underinvestment and institutionalised workarounds the challenge to transform will be much greater.
In these instances we face the accumulation of many rational short-term decisions that become increasingly harder to untangle. Essentially you end up with a set of repeated patterns of behaviours (or habits) that are harder to change as time passes. This situation in software development is referred to as technical debt where the ability to scale is limited and the costs of keeping up also increases.
The situation is tolerated until it becomes too late to ignore because it's no longer sustainable. So how do we go about breaking this cycle?
