{"id":969,"date":"2015-11-29T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-29T10:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/future-finance-talent_112915\/"},"modified":"2015-11-29T10:51:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T10:51:00","slug":"future-finance-talent_112915","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/future-finance-talent_112915\/","title":{"rendered":"Finance talent:  automation skills now trumping analytics skills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our current in-the-field study looking at <em>Re-architecting the Finance Function for the Digital Age<\/em> (click <a href=\"https:\/\/www.research.net\/r\/finance-digital\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> if you are yet to complete it) is confirming some major changes in the capabilities organizations need from their finance staff:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_19146\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/FA_Talent_Shifts1.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-19146\" src=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/FA_Talent_Shifts1-e1448890410739.png\" alt=\"Need for Automation skills in F&amp;A increasing\" width=\"578\" height=\"434\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>What&#8217;s eye-opening, here, is the softening focus on analytics skills and the huge increase in the need to understand automation and better define business\u00a0outcomes. \u00a0I&#8217;ve long preached that you can&#8217;t really get the data your organization\u00a0needs real-time, if you don&#8217;t have well automated processes to generate it in the first place.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600; font-size: 14pt;\">Enterprises are settling for what they have, and are now focused on making it function more productively<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s becoming clear that staff have to be less focused on creating data, overseeing operational processes and performing routine tasks, and much more adept at figuring out how to make better <em>sense<\/em> out of what they are doing to achieve more measurable, value-add results (outcomes) for their\u00a0organizations.<\/p>\n<p>In many cases, enterprise operations leaders are realizing they can&#8217;t create armies of world class<!-- pagebreak --> data scientists out of their current\u00a0crew, and it&#8217;s simply too expensive to hire top-notch MBAs to sit around all day trying to correlate data points. Yes, you need to have some of those people on staff, and yes, you can pay your service provider or consultant to add data talent, but the more immediate and tangible need to shifting to automating finance processes more effectively, and the influx of robotic process automation tools and platforms is changing the conversation.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600; font-size: 14pt;\">The fat fluffy middle is running out of excuses<\/span><\/p>\n<p>When you talk to customers today, there is a clear growing lack of tolerance and impatience to run operations more efficiently and more digitally&#8230; and you simply can&#8217;t do that when you rely on messy processes, poorly integrated systems, on-premise software and over-reliance on constant manual intervention to just to keep the lights on. \u00a0The excuses around security fears of the public cloud, the offshore outsourcing horror stories have run dry and it&#8217;s time to act.<\/p>\n<p>Our recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/category\/2015-as-a-service-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">As-a-Service Study<\/a> clearly outline the growing bifurcation between leadership vision and middle-management inertia:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_17976\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Leadership-v-Staff-Criticality-of-AaS-e1433004165455.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-17976\" src=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Leadership-v-Staff-Criticality-of-AaS-e1433004165455.jpg\" alt=\"Click to Enlarge\" width=\"578\" height=\"434\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Let&#8217;s be honest, most people are <i>comfortable<\/i> with their daily grind \u2013 they stare at metrics on spreadsheets, ensure exceptions are handled and the corporate engine keeps running. They turn up at meetings and say all the right things, avoid challenging the status quo (while acknowledging there can always be improvement), but deep down have settled for adequacy and a steady treadmill of efficiency without too many fireworks or drama.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span style=\"color: #ff6600; font-size: 14pt;\">The Bottom-line: \u00a0It&#8217;s time to get with the program, or get out of the way<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Why would they want to learn how to access and interpret data more intelligently? Why <i>would<\/i> they want to find problems, as opposed to reactively solving them when they crop up? Why would they want to mimic manual processes into scripts to have them run robotically, when they can patch over these inefficiencies\u00a0with cheap offshore labor? Why would they want to explore the potential of artificial intelligence and self-learning computing capability when they can just <i>do<\/i> these things themselves (or at least pretend to do them). \u00a0Answer \u2013 they have <i>no burning platform<\/i> to change the way their\u00a0do their jobs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">But there is one significant burning platform that will <i>burn<\/i> them, if they are not willing to adapt to the As-a-Service world: they will be <i>irrelevent<\/i> in tomorrow\u2019s enterprise. \u00a0Yes, they may be lucky and survive in legacy organizations that can get away without changing, or they may be in their late 50\u2019s and only care about lasting a few more years until retirement, but \u2013 for most \u2013 if they cannot adapt to As-a-Service, their bosses will shift them on and either replace them with a service provider staffer, or just simply phase out their legacy job, as it was not really needed anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em>Stay tuned as we drip this study out to market in the next few weeks. \u00a0The world changed at lot in 2015, and we need to get back to basics in 2016 to understand actions customers are taking to change with it&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our current in-the-field study looking at Re-architecting the Finance Function for the Digital Age (click here if you are yet&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,56,57,835,78,80,838,90,91,831,832,830,96,97,98,837],"tags":[750],"organization":[],"ppma_author":[19],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-process-outsourcing-bpo","category-design-thinking","category-digital-transformation","category-f-a","category-hfsresearch-com-homepage","category-hr-strategy","category-kpo-analytics","category-robotic-process-automation","category-saas","category-smac-and-big-data","category-sourcing-best-practises","category-sourcing-change","category-survey-re-architecting-finance-for-the-digital-age","category-talent-in-sourcing","category-the-as-a-service-economy","category-the-industry-speaks","tag-talent"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO 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