The COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst to accelerate investment in digital transformation, 75% of CFOs (Chief Financial Officer) consider it so. Today what CFOs are looking for is how to use or carry out projects related to the business, which allow them to have a higher profitability than they have been working on in the past, says Alejandro González, general manager for Mexico and Central America at Rimini Street.
In the market study CFOs Outlook 2021: Investment priorities in IT and digital transformation , by Rimini Street, more than 100 companies that invoice more than 200 million dollars annually were surveyed in Mexico, and found important findings that are on the way to the use of digital technologies to boost companies and give better experiences to end customers.
In an interview, Alejandro González points out that “digital transformation implies the optimization of processes, of how companies operate internally; on the other hand, it is how these processes impact employees, how they have access to better forms of mobility to perform their jobs and generate value for the company. And then come issues of the Internet of things (IoT), information or data exploitation and other projects ”.
The survey shows that 76% of CFOs consider digital transformation to be one of the top five corporate priorities, and within this percentage, 48% of those interviewed indicate that digital transformation is among their top three priorities.
In this context, a greater interrelation between the CFO and the CIO (Chief Information Officer or Director of Technologies) has been necessary, even the study reveals that 97% of those interviewed agree that a successful CFO has an excellent relationship with the CIO. Alejandro González explains that with the health contingency, CFOs have to understand more about technology and what the impact is on their businesses.
While the CIO is also understanding more of the CFO’s tasks, such as looking for “high return on investment projects that allow a better balance in the business per se , position them and make a recovery of what they have lost due to the same effects and the financial stress of the pandemic ”, he asserts.
Likewise, it refers that CFOs rely on information to improve decision-making and, through IoT, e-commerce and the exploitation of consumer data, define offers or products more aligned to certain niches that generate them. higher profitability. Thus they optimize investments and reallocate budgets in things that have a greater return on investment; in fact, research shows that 75% of CFOs aim to fund digital transformation initiatives with a strong return on investment.
“Everything is directed at how I can increase my sales, increase my profitability, optimize the costs that I already have and am committed to having, but how to add operational efficiency, assigning new budgets and selecting exactly the projects that make a difference to me on the day. with day, I can survive and have an anchor that allows me to support the growth levels of the company, and also what the client and the end user are looking for as an experience ”, explains the general manager for Mexico and Central America.
What CIOs and CFOs have to achieve is operational efficiency in the digital transformation and for this, they must find business partners that help them have the best of both worlds: “on the one hand, optimize fixed costs in the companies, such as the supports that ERPs have, which in this case are SAP and Oracle, which are very high— find how to lighten that maintenance load, which is recurring every year, and can lower them to at least 50% with services, for example , like the one provided by Rimini Street ”, he says.
And, on the other hand, observe how those savings plus additional allocations from CFOs to the CIOs budget make it easier to enable digital transformation projects that can even take weeks; then, it ensures that with small things that they implement, the return on investment occurs naturally and practically immediately.
“This balance and this search for suppliers that allow them to obtain that, I believe that it becomes central to the achievement of business objectives, and what we see is undoubtedly a watershed: the CFO is 100% committed to working with the CIO. and to understand more about the CIO’s business, and on the other hand, the CIO is more committed to meeting what the CFO’s requirements are and how all the projects that are developed from technology have a greater impact on the business ”, says Alejandro González .
