CFOs driving cloud adoption to achieve exponential growth

The fast changing business environment and technology advancements—particularly the emergence of and maturity in cloud models—are enabling CFOs to evolve ­­and emerge as the organizational change agent. The CFO has emerged a powerful influencer within the organization—no longer is the CFO confined to managing cost and operational efficiencies.

Traditional CFO had to be content with incremental gains, today the CFO is dynamic and leverages technology to drive exponential organizational growth. The traditional CFO was primarily preoccupied with sustaining performance by managing costs, containing organizational expenditure and keeping the lights on, the new CFO can and must participate in designing and driving organizational strategy and growth.

The CFO is uniquely positioned to drive change within the organization as the role entails insights into every aspect of the business. According to a survey conducted by London-based Longitude Research for Oracle and Accenture, 32% of CFOs from global organizations with revenues in the range of $250 million- $1billion+ are playing a key role in business transformation.

While CFOs have recognized the potent value of cloud, the challenge for CFOs is to grasp the power of technology and harness it in effective ways to manage the transition from “maintaining the show” to “managing business growth”.

Cloud computing has radically impacted the way technology is consumed and significantly enhanced decision-making capabilities, enabling CFO can lead organizational change. Specifically, CFOs can lead cloud adoption within organization to achieve the following results:

• Cloud computing is facilitating exponential organizational growth by converting the CAPEX for technology investments into OPEX, enabling the CFO to invest in other critical growth areas such as geographic expansion, hiring resources, training employees, etc.
• The on-demand model of cloud computing is making organizations nimble, agile and responsive to external business environment as IT can quickly harness technology platforms and roll out projects.
• The pay-as-you-go model is spurring innovations as it requires little upfront cost to start new projects and run pilots. If the result is not successful, businesses can quickly wrap up the project and move on to other innovations.
• CFOs are able to keep a tighter rein on enterprise security by leveraging identity-based access to resources, automated alerts for thresholds and breaches.
• CFO can keep budgets and resource utilization under control by allocating resources to different businesses and automating monitoring processes.