On February 13th I attended the ProformaTECH 2014 conference in Las Vegas, a gathering of finance professionals and subject matter experts discussing issues of the day and collaborating and sharing ideas on how to tackle them. For those of you not familiar with Proformative, it is an online resource for senior finance,
Like all conferences, the day opened with a keynote speaker. This time it was John Stephens,
So, if there were two big takeaways they were:
1. CFO’s need to embrace the fact that their roles and the roles of the departments they manage are changing. Finance departments are being expected to add more value to their organizations than ever before.
2. The Cloud
In fact, these two themes defined the entire day. To many presenters, adding value meant gaining efficiencies within the core functions we all think of within finance, i.e. accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, fixed assets, etc, etc. Others introduced the need to compile and use more operational data along with financial data in a way to help
In almost all cases, applications running in the cloud were looked at as ways to gain efficiencies, and to get at and organize more data very quickly. A term that was used on more than one occasion was “ERP augmentation.” The explanation for this was that there are often issues around being able to change out old legacy systems - in some cases more than one - in order for organizations to gain the efficiencies they are looking for. To address this, many organizations were turning to subscription based cloud products for ERP augmentation, to solve issues such as billing, collections, revenue recognition or corporate performance management. The trend that most speakers observed - and many attendees validated - is that a global rip-and-replace strategy to existing technology is no longer the answer. For many, that strategy often turned out be expensive, take longer than expected, and have an ROI (if one was realized at all) that just took too long to be realized. Cloud applications are now being used to augment the overall technology stack within an organization, whether it’s a cloud ERP system for a subsidiary or a corporate wide BI tool.
As the conference ended, I walked away with some great insights on what other people in my position are doing to handle many of the same challenges I face in my daily job. I definitely felt that I had gained knowledge and made contacts that will make me a better finance professional than before I attended. Well done, Proformative!