| | June 20189CIOReviewWIN BIG OR BUST­MAKING THE RIGHT BETS ONCORPORATE FINANCIAL SYSTEMSOnce you cover some of the fundamentals like the budget, on-premise or cloud-based preferences, and other basics, the "lucky seven" mentioned can make you­and your finance partners­a winnermaintenance. Don't order the Cadillac if a Corolla is going to get you there equally well.2. Think "out of the box": Going hand in hand with "simpleris better," encourage your finance team partners to consider using solutions "out of the box" vs. over-customization. Not only does customization adversely impact how easy and cost-effective it is for the IT organization to support and maintain, it doesn't let you leverage vendor-based upgrades and solutions easily. Companies willing to maintain strong discipline over minimizing customization will love the extra time to plan true innovation vs. figuring out why the last customization doesn't work in the latest upgrade.3. Prioritize differentiation: Simple, out of the box solutionsis a good general guideline, but certain things require an IT solution with a few more bells and whistles. Determine what processes need differentiation. For example, if your business relies on complex multiple-element contracts that require sophistication in revenue recognition, but doesn't execute any speculative hedging strategies, guide finance to invest in contract management and revenue systems that capture detailed information critical to revenue recognition guidelines and necessary for managing the operational aspects of contracts and use a simpler solution for your treasury operations.4. Size matters: Help your finance partnerschoose a "right-sized" solution that will accommodate reasonable growth plans. Being the marquis client for an edgy software start-up could mean you're putting yourself at risk with a vendor who may not be around to support your growth. But you also don't want to buy the corporate titan-sized ERP solution with hopes of "growing into it" and discover you have features you'll never use at your current growth rate and you're #372 in their list of priority clients.5. It's not just a financething: Understand the business use case for corporate financial tools outside of the finance realm. The accounting department may be looking at the near-term priority of getting a more functional and reliable SOX-compliant general ledger system, but are they thinking about capturing information for critical segment or product-line P&Ls or legal entity or statutory financial results? Don't let your finance partners buy or build systems that only operate in one dimension, or you'll find their counterparts asking you to create separate tools that address their own needs.6. Mind (or mine) your data: In today's corporate financeenvironment, if you're not using (or planning to use) data analytics, you're missing a chance at the jackpot. Encourage your finance partners to select tools that will manage and use data to solve problems and provide insights. That means engaging them in those important conversations about master data management to capture all the most critical elements inherent in their data, helping them maximize the data analytics capabilities in the current environment, and building or buying analytics and visualization platforms that bring those insights to life.7. Compliance counts: Keeping up with theregulatory environment is tough, but bring compliance partners in to the decision-making process early­internal audit, tax, data privacy, cyber security and other compliance partners to add value to the decision-making process or at least let your partners make informed decisions. I've seen a lot of corporate financial system projects focus on the operational aspects of a system, and compliance considerations such as SOX artifacts, access controls, security, and data privacy get addressed after the solution is bought/built which can be expensive and time-consuming. Betting on compliance by design pays off over time. Once you cover some of the fundamentals like the budget, on-premise or cloud-based preferences, and other basics, these "lucky seven" can make you­and your finance partners­a winner in the corporate financial systems game. Make sure the odds are in your favor before you roll the dice. Michelle DeBella
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