From Historian to Soothsayer: How CFOs Can Future-Ready Their Organizations in the Age of Complexity with Accenture

In recent years, the role of financial leaders has evolved from historian to soothsayer, and yet CFOs don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future. Whether it’s optimizing operations and upping productivity or accelerating growth and addressing sustainability, today’s CFOs are being asked to drive enterprise reinvention and navigate an overwhelming number of complex decisions. It’s “to the point where 68% of CFOs are driving three or more enterprise-wide transformation initiatives in parallel,” says Aneel Delawalla, who leads Accenture’s CFO and enterprise value strategy practice.

With the increasing weight of large-scale organizational decisions resting on their shoulders, how can CFOs rethink the ways they approach business challenges and productively and proactively guide their organizations through transformation? How should they reassess and reimagine their decision-making to activate change more effectively? And how can they maximize the effectiveness of their strategic decision-making to better navigate today’s fast-paced and complex business environment, and better ready their organizations for the challenges ahead?

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Aneel Delawalla, Managing Director of Accenture Strategy, CFO & Enterprise Value, and Paul Carr, Accenture’s HXM Ecosystem Lead for Solutions, explore how CFOs can make better, faster, and more strategic decisions that will future-ready their organizations and set the stage for success.

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Read the transcript from this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast below:

Jeanne Dion:

Welcome to the SAP Concur Conversations podcast. Each episode, we sit down with industry experts, visionaries, and leaders as they share what it takes to build forward-thinking spend programs. Our goal is to get you to think differently about how your organization spends money. My name is Jeanne Dion, and I am the vice president of the value experience team, here at SAP Concur. My team works with our customers to bring positive business outcomes, based on data-driven insights. Today, I'm joined by Aneel Delawalla and Paul Carr of Accenture, and we're going to talk about how CFOs can make better, faster, and more strategic decisions that will future ready their organizations and set the stage for success. Gentlemen, would you mind introducing yourselves? Aneel, let's start with you.

Aneel Delawalla:

Thank you so much, and thanks for having me on. By way of introduction, I lead Accenture's CFO and enterprise value strategy practice, and I work with CFOs and their leadership teams across two dimensions. One, really transforming and driving optimization across the finance function, but also partnering with them to drive enterprise wide transformation, given the unique role CFOs tend to play in an enterprise. So, thanks again for having us. Paul, over to you.

Paul Carr:

Thanks, Aneel, and likewise, a pleasure to be part of this podcast. So, I do sit within our SAP intelligent business platform technology business. I am the HXM ecosystem lead for solutions, which includes SAP Concur, and my real focus is in driving the employee experience, powered by SAP solutions. So, looking forward to having this conversation. Thank you.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, thank you both for being here today. I think about this in many different ways, but one of the first things I think about, when I think about finance and the finance motion, I actually do think about history because reporting what has happened has typically been a predominant role for our finance organization and for our finance leaders, really. But there's a movement to move from that historian aspect to almost a soothsayer for the organization as itself.

That digital transformation has hit the C-suite. There's other areas that have digitized and automated, but now, those C-level executives are actually being asked to fuel an enterprise look at organizations. So, I'm going to toss it back to you all, to see what have you been hearing, and why is that CFO the focus of this reinvention of the interconnected enterprise highway?

Aneel Delawalla:

You are so right, and I love the way you've summed it up, in terms of that interconnected highway. So, more and more, what we are seeing and hearing from our CFO clients is the increased responsibility that they're taking on for enterprise reinvention, total enterprise reinvention. That study that you mentioned at the top, around paradox of choice for CFOs, what we found was more than 90% of CFOs are feeling like they're being asked to do more than their predecessors were asked to do, more than they have done in prior years. And they're being asked to do that across the enterprise, whether that's optimizing the operations and finding productivity or accelerating growth and driving top line.

And ultimately, it's because of the unique role the CFO plays in a company. They obviously, along with the CEO, have a unique relationship with the board, but they're also responsible for driving collaboration and transformation across the C-suite, in partnership, in an interconnected way, to the point where 68% of CFOs are driving three or more enterprise-wide transformation initiatives in parallel. And those span the gamut from sustainability and ESG type items, to workforce and workplace, to drive improved employee experience, to digital and process transformation, to yield productivity and processes. So, it's really about the step forward CFOs are taking and leveraging the insights of a digital core that enables them to collaborate better, but also be more predictive and prescriptive as well.

Jeanne Dion:

And I know, when I hear this, I think about it from a perspective of value, value to the organization, value to the employees, value to the shareholder. It's an entire ecosystem of value, but what does value mean to an organization when we're looking at this type of digitization and pulling together a strategy to make it a more cohesive unit of operation?

Aneel Delawalla:

Maybe I'll start and then ask Paul to chime in here, particularly around the experience angle, but the way we think about value is a 360 degree notion of value. So, there's the traditional notion around financial value, around what are you adding to the top line and the bottom line, but there's also elements around sustainability, around the ESG agenda. There's elements around customer experience and how loved you are by your customers, around employee experience. There's elements that are also very specific to any industry that you may be in. It may be around having a transparent supply chain. It may be around making sure you have resources that are coming from conflict-free zones, so on and so forth. So, it really is about taking an entire stakeholder lens of value and not just the traditional, financial lens.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

Paul Carr:

Yeah. And for me, some of it, from an employee perspective, is they want to be able to focus on their core job, their core function within the business, and not be bogged down by administrative activities. And so, if you think about expense management, it's something that all employees have to do. Even though we've had this tough time with the pandemic, there's always still been a level of expense being generated, even if policies have changed with the work from home, etc. But as an employee, I want to be able to do my expenses quickly, effectively, get them submitted through the process, be reimbursed so that I can focus on the value creation that I'm looking to deliver for the company, in the role that I have. And then, for the CFO, they'll be looking at it in terms of their team, who've got to process those expenses. They've got to audit those. They want that activity to be seamless and as easy as possible so that, again, they can focus on the slightly more strategic or more higher value activities within their particular function.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that higher activity, Paul, because I think about work being tactical, versus strategic, and so many of the people coming into the workforce, these days, have a lot of experience and focus on strategic, because many of the tactical functions have been taken care of through automation. Correct? So, when you're looking at that employee experience, and you're looking at that automation of process and reinventing your systems, can you talk a little bit about how employee experience is really a crux in that type of piece for the organization and that why CFOs are really having to pay attention to it? It's not just the chief human resources officer that's looking at this anymore. It's really involving the CFO. Would you mind talking a little bit about that?

Paul Carr:

And yeah, sure. So, what we're seeing, again, is that you've got a whole generation of people joining the workforce, who've got a set of expectations and a set of views on how they want to interact with systems, and expense management is one of those ones where they're not used to spreadsheets. We're having a whole group of people coming in. They're not used to spreadsheets. They're used to wanting to do things on an app. They want to be able to do everything digital on the go. They want to have this ecosystem of solutions behind there that makes life easy. So, if I go off and entertain someone, or I go to a hotel and stay, I just have to worry about checking in, checkout. It's all touchless, but all of that data is being provided to a system, without me having to do much to interact with it.

So, that's just one of the starting points around that employee experience. If that admin activity is seamless and easy for me, I feel like, okay, I can focus on what I've been asked to do for the company, and then that will start to expand that into the procurement function or to other business functions, as well, for those employees. And again, as I mentioned earlier, if you're going into that finance function, you're going to be looking at how do I add more value? How do I do things for the company? That doesn't mean I'm sitting there, checking receipts, because it's automated. There's some AI being involved for this, to be able to check things, and I'm looking at just those outliers or anomalies, more than anything else.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, I often — I'm sorry. Go ahead, Aneel.

Aneel Delawalla:

No, I was just going to build on Paul's point of the concept of these transformations that occur in parallel, the ones that are truly unlocking business benefit, truly driving differentiated employee experience, are ones that are interconnected but running in parallel, rather than operating in their own silos, where T&E is doing something separate from accounting, separate from procurement, separate from FP&A, separate from HR. It's this notion of enterprise reinvention, where there's this concept of it being a compressed transformation, compressed in the sense that they're happening in parallel, in a compressed timeframe, rather than serial and siloed. And being able to coordinate that with the lens of how is this going to impact my employees and impact the experience, that makes it truly powerful.

Jeanne Dion:

When I think about this, I joke that, Pete, nobody comes out of college, these days, saying, "I want to be an AP clerk," or, "I want to be a line item auditor. That's really what I want to do with my life." It's that old monster.com ad. I want to be a mid-level manager. I think about it as the idea that this becomes a competitive advantage, these types of roles, because it's not just where you're working on business problems of sustainability or customer delight. You're actually working on delight of the employee and getting the most that you can out of every employee, to ensure that their skillset is being used at the highest value for an organization. And I think that's really where these projects tend to move forward. Would you disagree with that or have anything to add?

Aneel Delawalla:

No, you're spot on. And I would actually take it further, in the sense that it's not only an expectation that employees and customers have, but they are very adept at picking out where it's not true transformation, and it's only transformation theater, where there's an illusion of change and an illusion of transformation, and it's the words behind it, but the investment and the behaviors that are needed to follow through on it aren't there. Employees are saying, "I don't want to play along with that transformation theater anymore. I truly want to go deep and be part of the winning culture that is going to the better promised land, so to speak.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

Paul Carr:

And just to add to that, again, that's one of the biggest challenge that I can see currently, with some of the clients that I'm engaged in and talking to, who are on a much broader transformation journey, is they don't really know where to start. There's a lot of risk. There's a lot of unknowns. There's a lot of discomfort.

And to pick up on the point that Aneel made about making this transformation a real journey, why not start with something that will bring your employees along from the beginning? Get them involved. Use it as a trial. From a business transformation, there's certain processes that you can take out, in isolation, before you go into a mega transformational or completely changing your whole operating model or the way that you work.

Why not take something small? Use that as the pilot for the next thing because you can build upon that. You can learn from it. You can get that feedback. You can get the employees involved and engaged and find out where it's not worked. Okay. Again, it's expense management. It's not mission critical. It's not business critical. But it's got a high emotional impact if it goes wrong, and so doing something like this is a great way of testing up that transformation journey and, to the point Aneel was making, making it real, not just a bit of theater.

Jeanne Dion:

This reminds me of this thing that I've run into with our customers. Our customers are getting paralyzed with trying to figure out where to start. There's some sort of analysis paralysis because when you look at what organizations are facing, there's changes related to sustainability, and how are we going to bring that to the forefront? And it affects almost every single piece of the organization, so how do we tie all that data together? We've got that whole idea about employee retention and recruitment. How are we going to get that next level of leader, that next level of worker, who is engaged and feels like they're part of what they're doing?

We have that operational scalability. We can do it in one area, but we've never really scaled it across. There's process improvement. There's cost containment. There's increased revenue growth. There's so many things, and when you look at it, all at once, it becomes this, "Oh my God, what do I do?" And you talked about things running in parallel. How does a CFO's style and persona affect how this can become a very positive outcome for the organization, versus sitting there, paralyzed about what we're going to be doing?

Aneel Delawalla:

Yeah. And that's the fundamental premise of the paradox of choice. And to put a finer point on it, what we found was, as empowered, as powerful as CFOs are, two-thirds of them feel paralyzed, at times, because of the volume and velocity of choices coming at them and then the implications of their decisions. And so, we see CFOs that are successful, doing a couple of things. One of them gets exactly to their style and their decision-making attitude.

The first is this concept of running and reinventing, in parallel, and having the foot in today and the foot in tomorrow and the balance between being a financial steward and the balance between being the communication lead to external stakeholders, but also internal to the company so that you're setting the expectations on what this transformation's going to look like, what are the key moments in that journey going to be, and what are the benefits each of those stakeholders can expect?

And in that way, they really light up the second dimension that successful CFOs have, which is they are collaboration creators. So, the days of where the CFO issues a top-down target and a top-down mandate and then just pounds their fist on the table, we're seeing that that type of CFO isn't achieving the transformational, enterprise-wide outcomes.

But instead, what we're seeing is CFOs that are helping their C-suite peers break down decision-making silos, deconstruct decisions and understanding the interconnected nature of them, bringing people to the table, making people feel like they've been heard and seen and are bought in, and then framing those decisions in a concept of strength, from a competitive posture perspective.

Those collaboration creating type of CFOs really are up-leveling the performance of the enterprise, and ultimately, that comes back to a style and a persona of the CFO, and have they developed that muscle? Have they developed the articulation of that collaboration, as they got to the post?

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

Paul Carr:

And that's key, as well, in terms of the actual implementation. You need that collaboration across the C-suite because if you think about ... And again, just putting it in the simple context of expense management, you need to engage with your CHRO because, typically, they may own certain policies. You need to engage with the CIO and your technology because it's got to integrate into your different systems. So, if you can start that journey, and again, the CFO is the person who's going to drive this, if they can build that collaboration across the C-suite, get them all on board in the journey and where the values are and where it's going to be a benefit to the business, test it out and run it, you're going to start building up that network and trust in each other, to then be able to take that next step in that bigger transformation journey, that really has a significant impact across the enterprise.

Jeanne Dion:

You bring a really great point up there, Paul. It's that idea that these changes that are happening are not just static. They're not one and done. This is a mindset of continuous improvement, so building those foundational elements of cooperation and being part of a larger organization that's looking at a broader view of how you do business and when you do business and what you're using to do that business, to your point, whether it's an expense software or procurement software or anything else, it's that idea that this will continually grow and change. You can't really just sit and rest on your laurels anymore, can you? And it's a different skillset than what you had before, where you were highly analytical and just constantly looking at numbers. This requires people to have a broader set of people skills and, to your point, collaboration skills, to be successful in this role, which is really different than it was maybe 30 years ago or even 20 years ago.

Aneel Delawalla:

I would add to that and say that's why digital core and data type digital core become even more important because of your call-out around this being a continual renewal, a continual reinvention, in an continuous improvement type of way. Without the right data and platforms enabled by cloud and AI, with the right security around it, it really becomes difficult to continue the journey after the first step and then the second step. It really begins to break down, rather than being this continuous upward trajectory, where you continue to benefit from visibility and transparency of data, around predictive nature of algorithms, around the benefit of having a infrastructure that is protected and always improving. And so, it goes hand-in-hand with, in order to have business outcomes that reflect continuous reinvention, I need to have a digital core that has a renewal and a refresh rate embedded within it, to keep up with the business.

Jeanne Dion:

That leads me to a question around, I know we toss this phrase around a lot, but the future proofing or that planning for the future. This really is continuous improvement, really is truly planning for the future. And current situations that are happening now really, honestly happened in the past, but you mentioned the phrase velocity and volume. I don't think these things have all happened at once, where we've had a 12-month period, where we've had supply chain issues, a pandemic, civil unrest. We've had just a myriad of things. When you wake up every day, you're like, "I'm sure locusts are coming soon. I'm just waiting for them."

So, when we think about that, and we think about those current situations, in that current environment, is there any advice that you can give to CFOs and people in the C-suite, as overall, as to what they should be doing to ensure that they have that future proofing, that they have that positive [inaudible 00:22:03]? Is it around investing in the organization? Is it around staying the course, even if there's some bumps in the road? What would you recommend?

Aneel Delawalla:

And you didn't even mention inflation and geopolitical tensions, and it keeps amplifying.

Jeanne Dion:

I ran out of breath.

Aneel Delawalla:

But in terms of the capabilities we see, in order to cope with this myriad of factors coming at them, at ever-increasing velocity and volume, we're seeing a couple of things that really differentiate and allow certain organizations to out compete and outperform. One, it's the ability to have a scenario-planning capability, a robust scenario-planning capability, that has the right data sources, it's agile, so you can make quick terms on it, and it doesn't take you a month to do a scenario. But ultimately, it brings together data that you have internal to the company, data that you're getting from third-party data sources or macroeconomic type information, to say, "Where should I make decisions?" Not in a monolithic sense, but in a customer segment by customer segment, market by market, channel by channel type of way.

And then having the wherewithal, from a leadership capacity perspective, but also a investment capacity perspective, to say, "If I pull back the reins on all of my investments, I am consigning myself to the fate of falling behind." And so, you may need to move investments around on the game board, but realizing what investments are you going to allow you to take share and allow you to differentiate, and doubling down on those while, perhaps, rationalizing the other things that you had on the table. But stepping away from all of those investments is really going to limit your ability to not only compete in the now, but set yourself up for the future, as well, whether that's from an employee lens or a customer lens.

Jeanne Dion:

I think about this from the idea of the good expense, versus the bad expense, and I think of something near and dear to my heart, travel bans. As you start to look at how you're going to pull expenses back and be cost containing, many organizations just say, "That's it. Nobody's traveling for the rest of the year." But in some cases, this actually is an investment that you may need to make, and you may need to not make this broad declaration that this is going to happen, and this is how it's going to be, because you leave yourself in the lurch and open yourself to a, perhaps, competitor getting in there, who has taken a look at the data and really thought about what they want to invest in, from a good expense, versus a bad expense perspective.

And Paul, I was just going to ask, from your perspective, as we look at expense reporting and expenses overall, whether it's travel based or non-travel based that come through expense reports, are we seeing customers still working to those travel bans? I know I've seen some open up. I heard some statistics, this morning, that the majority of airfare rebound and hotel rebound has not been through business travel. It has been through individual travelers. So, do we have any advice on how you would take a look at those pieces of spend within your organization, to optimize it?

Paul Carr:

So, I'll give you my perspective, I think, on how businesses have responded and reacted. So, there were some significant cost savings, when the pandemic came along and travel stopped, because it was enforced, and a large number of businesses were able to continue functioning and operating, to such a point that even though things are becoming a slightly easier, and there's more freedom to travel, businesses are still saying, "We could survive, and we did well." In fact, in some cases, businesses improved significantly and managed their costs by not having people travel.

But I think, as individuals, we miss that interaction with people in person, so I think you were seeing the stats coming up that are on individual travel because people who got fed up with working from home offices, they wanted to get out and about again. But what I am seeing though, as a trend, is a lot more companies are putting in preapproval processes, to really justify, in advance, the reason for the travel and why they're going and what's the value proposition from it and really putting in, now, a lot more preapproval, rather than you had blanket approval, you could go and travel and off you go, no problem, no questions asked, to really, now, preapproval.

And a lot of it is really to manage and contain some of that spend and just really make sure it's the right spend, and then, when it is approved, it's going via the right channels to get that data back in and also to add to it that traceability of where are your employees. If something, as you said in this climate that we have, something untoward was to happen, we could help our employees get them back home from wherever they are.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, I often describe that pre-approval for travel as almost a purchase order for traveling. We're so used to making purchase orders and putting in purchase requests around larger dollars spend, and corporations have gotten really used to it. Travel is probably the last frontier where that pre-approval isn't organized or automated in a way that it has been in a purchasing perspective, so that's a really great perspective there that you have. Thank you for bringing that up. It's always at the top of my mind, purchase orders for traveling.

So, I know I could talk to you for a very long time, and I'm hopeful that I will get to talk to you again because, in addition to the paradox of choice for the CFO, there is going to be an additional study coming out as almost a follow-up or an additional extension of what you're describing here. And so, I would recommend to anybody, please go out and take a look at that study. It's really fascinating, and there's some incredible information in there. So, go out onto the Accenture website, and please feel free to request a download of it. But I know you're going to be coming back, I hope, fingers crossed, to talk to me about that next level.

I could talk to you all day, but what I really want to just see if I can encapsulize what we talked about here, so that idea that now CFOs, instead of being a back office function, where really only the analysts ever saw them and served with them, they're really up there, leading from the front, now, from a larger, organizational perspective, in some ways filling a role that's similar, you would see, across other areas of the C-suite. They're back up there, and they're coordinating. And they're actually the ones who are putting together some of this scenario planning.

They need to take a look at how they're doing their work. They need to make sure that the organization is working together, in a cooperative way, rather than in silos and bring that organization into a more structured, long-term planning type of view, rather than just that historical, this is what happened. This is not only what happened, this is what's happening now, and this is where we're going in the future. And you need to be on board with me, and there's how we're going to get there.

Aneel Delawalla:

Absolutely.

Jeanne Dion:

Okay.

Aneel Delawalla:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jeanne Dion:

Good, I got it.

Aneel Delawalla:

You passed the test and-

Jeanne Dion:

Passed the test.

Aneel Delawalla:

...Yeah, you're ready for your second level exams.

Jeanne Dion:

Fantastic. I'm excited for that second level, and again, I want to thank everybody for listening in with us. I want to thank you both for being part of this conversation. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you and learn from you. This is really quite an extraordinary topic, and it's one that I've been thinking about for a long time. So, I'm thrilled to have you here.

Paul Carr:

Great.

Aneel Delawalla:

Thank you so much.

Jeanne Dion:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast. To hear more exclusive insights and interviews from the world of business, travel, expense, and invoice processing, be sure to subscribe and listen wherever you find your podcasts. And please join us again for our next SAP Concur conversation.

Learn more about how CFOs can overcome the paradox of choice, accelerate strategic decision-making, and unlock greater shareholder value from an enterprise reinvention agenda in Accenture’s whitepaper, The Paradox of Choice for CFOs: A guide for Enterprise Reinvention in the Age of Complexity.

Want to hear more conversations like this one? Check out the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.