CFO Studio Magazine - CFO Innovation Award Winners

CFOs’ Evolving Roles Seamless Communications H ere’s the straight scoop: You’re going to need all the talent, insight, and experience you have acquired just to stay in the game. Further, to do your job well, you’ll need to read widely and network frequently, both with peers and the knowledgeable professionals with whom you do business. CFOs today work for companies that are growing and changing in multiple ways, says Peter Dontas, market executive, middle market at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. In 2015, to be a CFO in a middle-market company ($50 million–$2 billion in sales) requires more than just tactical skills. CFOs are taking on new, strategic responsibilities to help their companies handle diverse issues. In fact, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s 2015 CFOOutlook Survey found that 63 percent of CFOs take a strategic role vis-à-vis technological advances, and 69 percent take a strategic role involving risk management. Other areas requiring strategy are data management, human resources planning, and communications. Dontas has watched the CFO’s role evolve over 15 years, and says that it is driven partly by global expansion of mid-market companies, raising new complexities of supply, purchasing, and payment systems. It is also driven by technology and innovation, which raise new risks. “The risks are different now, and they can really blindside you if you don’t have the systems and capabilities and risk management systems to avoid falling into a trap,” he says. C I f you walked around your company and asked people of different generations and different job descriptions what technologies they use in their communications, you’d get many different answers. Voice only, text chat, sharing documents via the cloud, doing a customer demo via Skype: all these and other means and technologies are likely in use every day. But many companies have no unified plan in place to facilitate their employees’ disparate approaches to communication. “The best way to communicate is the concept of ‘unified communications,’” says Lew Jaffe, professor of business at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and a board member of Yorktel, a videoconfer- encing service provider. “At the end of the day that just means letting people share communication in the best way they can, regardless of the modality they use to join the conversation.” In planning for a workplace where workers can easily share and collaborate over time zones, says Jaffe, an organization’s leadership needs to start from the concept of ROE — in this case, that’s not “return on equity,” it’s “return on engagement.” “If you get people engaged, if they’re having fun, if they’re having dialogue, they’re more effective,” says Jaffe. So start by looking for engagement and build your infrastructure to support it. One of the obstacles to companies installing the technology to make communications unified and seamless is the 90-day cycle with which CFOs — at least, public company CFOs — live. After upgrading communications for every department, to begin to see a new level of energy in the organization as people collaborate on projects does not happen within a neat, three-month time frame. But a CFO who is a progressive thinker and leads organizational change can reap long-term rewards by improving communications. “What if you could have people 10 times more prepared [for an off-site meeting] because they’ve been working together as a group for a month before they actually laid eyes on each other?” asks Jaffe. “Aren’t you going to have a far more productive outcome?" C 2nd QUARTER 2015 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 45 KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER Visit www.CFOstudio.com to read more about the presenters