Our research found that agile finance leaders contribute to business agility and success in a number of meaningful ways, helping to increase their organization's competitive advantage. In particular, teams operating in an agile finance model are able to measure and report on intangible value more accurately, support agile go-to-market strategies, analyze innovation opportunities, improve resource allocation, and more.
One of the key findings of our research is that more agile finance leaders have helped to drive positive growth in their organizations (revenues and profits) over the last three year compared to their less visionary peers.
"We use a digital command center to monitor our new KPIs in real time. In addition to monitoring traditional KPIs, we started incorporating with some non-financial metrics that immediately reflect on the financials. Things like product engineering, completion rates, cycle times, and product engineering quality. And we are starting to pull on some external social measures – whether our developer count is relevant, our partner count is relevant."
"At Oracle, we faced exactly this challenge when we first began the shift from a vendor of on-premises, perpetual license software to a subscription-based, cloud model. Oracle's finance team played a critical role in this transition, partnering with the business to develop new KPIs to measure value in the digital age.
However, everything changes when you move to a cloud model. Take predictive KPIs. When you move to the cloud, you go from a few deals in the pipeline to many – which can sometimes be overwhelming. Bookings, provisioning, lead times, renewals, contract base, contract length, churn rates, in-time capital requirements (i.e., demand predictions), billing requirements and schedules, and waterfall schedules were just some of the KPIs we examined. In this new world, 'bookings' is the most critical predictive KPI, which was not the case in our old world.
Another example is capital expenditure requirements. Suddenly we were dealing with new data centers, provisioning, capital needs, and demand predictions. It took us a few months of trial and error to establish our most meaningful KPIs for the cloud business. We then presented our findings and recommendations to our C-suite.
This is where perseverance plays a huge role. The C-suite is demanding and intimidating and asks the toughest questions you will ever face. Don't worry if you don't hit a home run on your first try. The key is to provide information that is as meaningful and insightful as possible.
After multiple iterations, we implemented the new KPIs. There were just a handful to begin with, but we have established many more as our business has evolved."
