Articles
May 14, 2025
Creating a Unified Digital Strategy for Finance-IT Partnership
# People and Talent
# Technology
A company’s centralized approach to ensure finance functions interact with IT to produce digital tools that bring value.
A member of NeuGroup for Mega-Cap Treasurers recently discussed the creation of “a unified finance digital operating model” and “a single prioritization framework” to enable treasury and other finance functions to partner more effectively with IT so “the tools being developed would really hit the mark and generate the value we anticipated.”
- At the group’s spring meeting, the treasurer described leading a small group that identifies and prioritizes IT investments and digital tools—many created by finance team members who are “citizen developers”—that allows finance to best support the business.
- “We asked, ‘Is there a better way to approach this to make sure we have the right kind of capabilities sitting functionally within finance to work collaboratively with our IT organization to do it better?’” she said.
- “There were a number of capabilities we felt would benefit from centralization within the finance function under this digital operating model.”
Founder’s distillation. Following the member’s presentation, NeuGroup founder and CEO Joseph Neu distilled the session’s learnings this way: “This is really about creating a niche center of excellence to support treasury and finance function IT development with an emphasis on data and self-made tools/apps to analyze and process data (reporting and workflow improvement/automation).”
- He added, “The niche center helps provide governance on quality and security, and assists solution builders to draw upon previously created tools to avoid reinventing wheels or replicating what’s already been built. It also aids the identification of proper data sources and helps with access within the restricted data environment of a regulated company.”
Centralizing decentralized efforts. The treasurer made clear that centralizing aspects of developing digital tools does not mean directing every detail of how teams within finance create solutions or leverage technology. “It sounds like very heavy governance, ‘You need to come into the center, you can’t do things.’ It’s not that,” she said.
- “It’s really saying, if you want to do something, come to the center first so we can tell you if something has actually been done before; we can tell you what architecture you should use because it’s our finance standard. We can make sure that you have easier access to data products that have already been developed.”
- She added, “We really thought we had an opportunity to improve the benefit and the impact that we’re having with respect to these decentralized efforts. It’s really about better enabling the decentralized efforts that are going on across the organization as well as partnering with IT on the bigger things.”
Education and a survey. To set individuals up for success in developing tech solutions and “foster a culture of deep digital competency,” the member said, the company’s IT team initiated a self-directed training program based on an overall enterprise curriculum with both virtual and in-person sessions. “It allows you to tier your training based on your starting level of capability and also what your job requires,” she explained.
- “So things as elementary as intro to artificial intelligence and prompt engineering to more complex subjects such as data modeling and machine learning,” she added. Other subjects in the curriculum include data and analytics, enterprise architecture and security, automation and user experience.
- The team conducted an extensive survey to learn what the finance teams were working on. “We found there were so many different technology standards. And when people were developing solutions to solve their problems, they were using all sorts of things.
- “So we weren’t really learning from one another. We probably had 10 different groups that were building headcount dashboards. And there was very minimal reuse of work that had been done before.”
Pain points. In addition to the survey, the member’s team asked about pain points finance teams encounter. One case involved members of a group trying to build a depreciation forecasting tool who needed to access the correct data with the right confidentiality standards.
- “They said it took them six months to finally get permission to get the data they needed to do this, and then when they got it, it was actually not the data they expected. It was just this significant pain point with respect to data acquisition and ensuring the right confidentiality, but also making sure that when somebody asks for data, we actually know what it is and that it’s serving the purpose,” she said.
Collaboration and bridging gaps. The treasurer emphasized that under the new operating model, finance collaborates and communicates to find what IT needs from treasury and other functions. “We said, ‘what do you actually need from finance so that you can serve us better?’”
- The success of this collaboration depends on having the right people on the digital finance team to work with IT, the member said. “We weren’t getting maximum value out of the tools developed and it was clear that we needed to focus on better communication of requirements connected to technology.”
- “What we wanted to create here are people that understood both technology and our finance processes and data to be able to bridge that gap,” she added.
- Her team is evenly split between people with technology and finance backgrounds, some of whom moved from functions within finance, including audit.
Broad use cases. The member’s presentation included slides detailing two successful treasury use cases showcasing the value of the digital finance team. One involved forecasting intercompany revenue in nine key currencies, which required data curation to make intercompany sales actuals “fit for purpose” so that they can be correlated to forecasts on a management reporting basis. The solution saved 50+ hours in manual work annually.
- Data from this solution was also leveraged by the tax team to automate elements of the effective tax rate calculation, illustrating a key goal of the member’s groups: to pick projects and solutions with more than one application. “We try to make sure, as we think about this as a broader finance community, that as we prioritize the foundational data products that we’re looking at multiple use cases across multiple teams,” she said.
- Similarly, a property value collection tool developed for the insurance team (which reduced the hours spent on the process by more than 100 hours and significantly improved accuracy) was also leveraged by the manufacturing finance team to support fixed-asset audit requirements.
Looking ahead. The member told peers who are struggling with similar issues that her company is only part way through the journey of implementing the unified finance digital operating model.
- “The core to this is really having the deep data and process knowledge in finance along with the technical skills to be able to do this in the right way,” she said. “There’s still more that has to happen to completely get there.”