Workday podcast: Are CFOs the new data leaders?

Finance leaders have a number of opportunities to help their teams and the broader business by harnessing technology, data, and insights. Armed with the results from our latest global study, we spoke to Denise Chamberlain, executive vice president and CFO at EE Health, to get her perspective.

Gone are the days of finance teams simply pushing out numbers to their organizations at the end of the month. Finance teams are now the drivers of strategy at their organizations, making critical decisions that can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

“We have now moved into a world where things are changing so rapidly that finance must be much more responsive and give operations and leadership answers to how they should move forward strategically,” says EE Health Executive Vice President and CFO Denise Chamberlain.

If there’s one thing that keeps finance up to speed in this business climate, it’s the ability to take advantage of technology and use it to drive strategy for the entire business. Yet, our global study “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation” found that 64% of finance leaders admit it still takes weeks—or more—to get results at the end of a reporting period.

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, Chamberlain tells guest host Meg Wright, senior editor at Longitude, about the opportunities for CFOs to help their teams and the broader business by harnessing technology, data, and insights. Wright and Chamberlain also discuss the role played by finance leaders in accelerating their organizations’ transformations.

Below are a few highlights from the conversation, edited for clarity. You can find our other podcast episodes here. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts so you don’t miss an episode.

• “For the third year running, Workday and Longitude conducted a study of 1,150 senior business executives, 26% of those were finance leaders. The research shows that finance leaders are overall somewhat less confident in their ability to consistently meet business demands. It also shows that the transformation of their team continues to lag behind that of other core business functions such as IT and HR. Promisingly though, it also shows that CFOs are aware of these gaps and of their need to lead with greater confidence.” — Meg Wright
• “Finance has historically sat inside our little black box and pushed out numbers at the end of the month that said, ‘Revenues were this and expenses were this.’ But we’ve now moved into a world where things are changing so rapidly that finance must be much more responsive to giving operations and leadership answers for how they should strategically move forward. What should they invest in? What new services should they stand up? What services are losing money that require some tough decisions? Once we do that, then we will be able to help make those data-informed decisions and run those multiple scenarios, and we will be able to move at a greater speed.” — Denise Chamberlain
• “The biggest challenge that I have put upon myself, a responsibility, is to strengthen that bridge that we have been building between finance and operations so that everybody is comfortable walking both directions and stopping and talking on that bridge.” — Denise Chamberlain

Stay tuned here for more findings and the full “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation” report; we’ll also share more persona-specific findings for the office of the CFO, CIO, and CHRO.