The chief financial officer of most companies has been focused on the regulatory requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and then the cost-cutting requirements of the recession.

A KPMG research document stated: “Diverted by the need to respond to such pressures, finance executives enjoyed too few opportunities to elevate their financial planning and analysis capabilities.”

But the research report, entitled The Intelligent Finance Organisation, said that today organisations are pushing into new and different businesses: “reinvigorating the opportunity for the CFO to be more strategic”.

KPMG said: “As information needs are rapidly changing, finance executives have a unique opportunity to become strategic information leaders for their finance organisations and the enterprise as a whole — creating a more intelligent finance organisation and enterprise.

“Migrating to this new role is possible with the maturity of technologies such as data and analytics mobility, cloud, and collaboration tools, among others.”

KPMG added: “While organisations have spent significant capital on finance systems modernisation, it seems that key executives still do not have timely access to the KPIs [key performance indicators], metrics, and measures that matter most to them.”

Anish Kartha, a senior manager, management consulting at KPMG, said to do this, decision makers need: “The right data at the right time to make the right decisions.”

He explained that having the figures on hand in a timely manner allows those decision makers to make use of their natural analytics ability.

The presentation of the information is also important. It is easier for people to analyse data that is presented in graph form, he explained. “You can infer a lot from a graph”, demonstrating that a line graph illustrating the ups and downs of a product’s performance, for example, is immediately clear, while a bank of numerical data is much harder to extract information from.

He said ‘key performance indicators’, or KPI, are part of the culture of any organisation: “Any organisation has key indicators that it tracks itself and (uses for) strategic planning — the key indicators to see if they are on the right road.

“We help organisations define their KPI and define the dashboards that they have access to, and for their decision making,” he said.

KPMG’s Fred Oberholzer, an advisory senior manager, explained: “When you make any decisions in your personal life, in business it is exactly the same — although it is more complex. The numbers don’t drive it — it’s the key objectives the organisation has. You ask: ‘What do you want to achieve as an organisation? Your objective may be financial, it may be to make the organisation green — with KPIs, it shows how near you are to achieving your objectives.

“CFOs have really seen their roles change because they see so much of the data in an organisation,” he said. Because of this, CFOs can act as facilitators, to enable other people in the company to have access to better information.

And today there is a huge amount of data available. Mr Oberholzer said as much data was created in 2013 as was created in the entire period to the end of 2012. “So it doubled in a year — and it’s all stored somewhere.” And it is access to data that gives you an advantage, he said.

He said that as far as data analysis goes, organisations can start with reporting and making the resulting data available in real time. Currently, he said, organisations use historical data to make forward-looking decisions.

While the decision-making may in part be based on a gut feeling, this can be a good thing if the decision makers have access to good and timely data, as they will incorporate that information.

And reiterating the point made earlier by Mr Kartha, he said: “Business intelligence really focuses on enabling decisions — the right information being used at the right time to make the right decisions.”

KPMG said in its report: “ ... it is clear that the importance of improving the integration of operational information with financial results is understood and taking hold with today’s CFOs.”

It concluded: “The role of the CFO in the mobility discussion should not solely be about signing off on the business case. Every day, the CFO has access to business performance information that can help identify new ways to leverage mobility in an innovative way to drive top and bottom line value.

“The challenge is to see one’s self as the joint owner of innovation versus the person who write the cheques for innovation. This will require different thinking and approaches, and a cultural change across the business.”