How to Be a Hero to Your CFO

So your boss is the CFO? This blog’s for you, too. This month’s CFO magazine carries a story called In the Fast Lane, suggesting CFOs may be hot to update something near and dear to their hearts. “While most companies have modernized, digitized, and otherwise Webified their transactional systems,” CFO observes, “the [budget and planning] process remains frozen in time.” The magazine quotes a Ventana Research survey of U.S. companies with 1,000 or more employees, which found that “71 percent of the respondents intend to make significant changes in their budgeting and planning in the next two years. For many, those changes will involve deploying dedicated Web-based B&P systems.”

The biggest roadblock probably won’t be selecting a vendor (likely candidates being Hyperion, Cognos, FRx, Geac, and SAS Institute) or getting the thing set up (after all, that’s your job), but “convincing staffers to give up their beloved spreadsheets,” as CFO puts it. You can score big there, too, if you have some strategies for helping to get user buy-in.

To get learned on the topic, check out How to Win Friends and Influence Users from the CIO magazine archives, and Time to Change from the current issue.