5 Finance Skills For Digital Transformation

The pandemic has changed many organizations’ work environments. And it has directly affected the overall mindset, ways of getting work done, and cost of organization operations. As finance leaders, one critical factor to consider for budgeting is adopting digital transformation-related expenses, especially to upskill the finance team for digital transformation.

Automation will dominate: A factor changing the landscape is the need to adopt automation. Today organizations must understand that data and technologies are essential to leverage business data. With cloud computing and remote work becoming common, these technologies will only become more critical for organizations to understand.

The reality: As technology automates and takes over more transactional workflows, the finance organization has shifted from “number crunchers” to strategic advisors and business partners to the rest of the business.

Closing the digital skill gaps: The finance leaders should improve their ability to react quickly to the immediate skills needed to improve the current situation. You can apply two principles approach as follows:

1. Identify job-relevant skills that enable finance employees to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively.
2. Prioritize new skills that address the finance function’s imminent needs, and employees can develop them at the time of need.

This way, the training can improve the likelihood of employees applying the newly learned skills on the job and closing the finance skill gap. 

Let us look into the five essential skills your finance team needs for the digital finance transformation:

• Data literacy is interpreting, creating, and effectively communicating data.

  The management expects the finance team to read, write and present data from the sources. And then apply analytical techniques for data-driven financial insights.
  The business leaders will use data-driven financial insights to help identify hidden growth opportunities and manage risks. If the company lack skills in data literacy, it can cost the company revenue potential. And finance leaders must close this costly skill gap.

  How you improve data literacy in your organization depends on many factors, such as current user skillsets, the complexity of the data, and the types of analytics required. You can focus on these activities related to data literacy and use Power BI as the tool:

  -Interpreting charts and graphs
  -Assessing the validity of data
  -Understanding how context and outliers affect how to present the results

• Data analysis is a process of gathering, cleansing, transforming, and modelling data to discover useful information and conclusions to support decision-making. Data analysis is a critical aspect of all organizations to help determine the impact on their business, including evaluating customer sentiment, performing market and product research, and identifying trends or other data insights.

  The finance function deals with numbers and other structured and unstructured data. Finance professionals should be able to analyze these data to draw accurate and insightful conclusions.

  The finance department presents stakeholders with historical data to report business performance and forecasts revenue, costs, and cash flows. The knowledge of data analytics is essential for finance professionals to stay ahead of the curve.

  The concept of data analysis and its importance to business should not be understated. Power BI can help with data analysis and focus on cleaning, modeling, and visualizing data.

• Business intelligence (BI) is a technical process of analyzing data and delivering information to support business executives make informed decisions.

  BI tools can help users in discover hidden insights for making strategic decisions. Business intelligence can analyze historical and current data and present findings with intuitive visual formats.

  Using business intelligence in finance will enable CFOs to correlate investments and profitability across multiple dimensions of an organization. Such analysis will help CFOs further strategize on valuation or growth optimization for the company.

  Without BI, businesses had to do much of their research manually. Power BI can help transform raw data into easy-to-digest insights for everyone in the organization. The steps are data collection, analysis, visualization, and decision-making. Moreover, the Power BI tools can automate many processes and save companies time and effort.

• Advanced analytics uses AI and other techniques, including statistical and predictive forecasting.

  Advanced analytics signifies examining data beyond traditional analytics and business intelligence (BI). Traditional analytics or BI reviews historical data that reports on past results. 

  A survey shows that 80% of organizations forecast accuracy with increased use of advanced data analytics. Advanced analytics skills will remain critical to driving new business insights. 

  The following finance areas can benefit from advanced analytics forecasting and planning, risk management, and internal and external reporting.

  Power BI has advanced analytic features such as Quick Insights, AI Insights, and the Analyze feature. These features can quickly help finance functions to work with advanced analytics effortlessly.

• Data storytelling effectively communicates insights from a dataset through narratives and visualizations. It can put data insights into context to inspire action from your audience. It can also add a human touch to the numbers and figures from raw data. And it is about building a compelling narrative based on data and analytics that help tell a story and influence a particular audience. Microsoft Power BI can help you create a data-driven story for your presentation. You can create an intuitive report that transforms data and shares intuitive insights. You can also present data-driven visualizations that help support your narrative and influence your audience. Tell your data story your way to achieving your organizational goals. And influence your audience.

THE TAKEAWAY

Providing employees a tool to develop professionally has effectively shown team members they are valued. Supporting training enhances employees’ value and career marketability within the company. As leaders, you must show your employees you care about their learning and development needs. Your reward will be more productivity and higher retention for your effort.

I have a course that meets all the five skills above for Power BI. If you are interested, sign up here, and I shall be in touch!

Want to learn more about these skills? Read more here.