Finance transformation: to real time and beyond

I made a pretty fundamental and exciting career move back at the start of what proved to be an eventful summer for me (eventful in that I learnt that the money you pay for all singing, all dancing buildings insurance is *so* worth it, but that’s a different story). I left the job change unremarked on Linkedin at the time and I told myself that it was because I was busy and because I'm not in a client facing role anymore so, you know, who really cares? But I think a big reason was also that I felt uncomfortable leaving a job and a company that I liked so soon after joining (and so soon after making a big deal out of a role change at IBM).

The eight weeks since I joined Sage have helped me a) feel really happy about the decision I made, the exciting business I have joined and the brilliant colleagues I am working with, but also b) get some perspective on what I learned at IBM and why it's important to what I'll be doing at Sage. I've had a lot of time on planes and trains in the last few weeks, so I wrote down my thoughts on part b). It's not too long I promise …

Learning 1 - Finance transformation is all about getting to real-time and beyond

I have developed a bit of anallergic reaction to terms like 'future of finance', 'finance 4.0', 'finance reinvented' and all similar variants. Yes, you need to signal that finance operations have a very different and better future ahead of them and yes, you need a unifying strapline of some kind, but isn't there something that can be aspirational and actually mean something at the same time?

As I got a more informed view at IBM of the possibilities for Finance in using AI in particular I kept coming back to 'real time and beyond' - real time view of financial and process performance, real time processing of financial entries and transactions and real time responses to finance queries. The 'and beyond' picks up on the potential/necessity over time for predictive elements of finance processes and outputs as well as reflecting my daughter's Toy Story love. It's a strapline that struck me as having the right mix of being easy to know when you've arrived, easy to think though some impactful use cases where it can be achieved in the short term, while remaining super-aspirational and long term as an overall end-to-end finance process objective. To get to ‘real-time and beyond’ now a central plank of my thinking about finance operations success at Sage.

Learning 2 – Start thinking about user experience before you think about process flows

I had to re-learn quite a lot of my consulting fundamentals at IBM if I'm honest.  Most FTSE100 clients have done the benchmarking, as-is & to-be process mapping, op model thing, usually with the Big 4, and most of them either don’t need or want to do that again. That had been my bread and butter before IBM. I was dropped into a design thinking, user experience led, MVP building culture, with more enterprise cloud tools than I’d ever seen before (I giggle now at my 500MB cloud storage allowance at EY). I loved it as a leari=ning experience but, most importantly, I decided that it really works and that this was definitely something I should have known before (my bad).

My conclusion for finance transformation therefore was that if you’re not user-centred and agile you’re probably not going to change much, and you’ll end up with a bunch of slides and some pissed off people. So, for me at least, it’s out with the years long defined programmes called ‘#Finance4theFuture’ or whatever, and in with a user experience roadmap that doesn’t go much further than a quarter or two in much detail, but is working towards a grand ambition for finance that customers, colleagues and suppliers alike can get on board with. Yes, I know ERP transformation still has to be a years long thing but please don't call it #Finance4theFuture at the very least ...

IBM, by the way, is really good at this in many places and the IBM Garage concept has the potential to be brilliant. If you are *only* talking to the Big4 then you may be missing something imo.

Learning 3 – There really are no magic technology bullets

I kinda hoped that I would rock up at IBM, immediately crack how Blockchain and AI solved all Finance problems in one swoop, sell a bunch of that and then move seamlessly onto Quantum. Not so much it turned out. It's possible that's because I missed something but I think it's as much that, powerful as those technologies are, the ‘this changes everything’ narrative that exists in certain places is overblown. There are a fair few relatively recent ‘Finance in 2020’ type white papers kicking around that probably need to be pulped or changed to read 2030 instead.

IBM, as much or maybe more than anyone else, is guilty of making the tech play and not the root cause / process play. I decided in the end that this was an incentives thing – IBM’s built around ‘big deals’ and doesn’t have the internal desire in its DNA to do the solution agnostic consulting work unless there’s a pretty clear path to said ‘big deal’. Which is a shame because it’s actually pretty good at it and I think the ‘big deals’ would come in time with those clients, with a bit of patience. But yeh, if the name of your project = the name of a technology, or the project started when a vendor pinged you on Linkedin with a product pitch, then you may want to revisit the fundamentals of the problem you are solving / experience you are creating.

And there you have it - my writing = thinking, cathartic way of saying that I have decided that I can be super excited about my new gig and really grateful for my (short) time at IBM all at the same time. I hope some of you will have found it interesting (bit nervous about posting tbh but growth mindset and all of that). It's probably also fair to say that if you’re going to pitch me something it should be required reading *smiley emoji face*.