The Hackett Group's Finance Executive Insight report highlights the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on finance organizations. The pandemic exposed weaknesses in finance technology, with low levels of automation being a primary factor in hindering the sector's response. Organizations with high manual process intervention struggled to enable remote work and complete core processes, such as forecasting and closing the books. The report also notes that less technology-enabled teams were limited in their ability to provide management with insight during extreme volatility. Respondents to the Covid-19 Response Poll cited difficulty keeping up with the pace of change and addressing stakeholders' demand for forward-looking information as the two biggest hurdles to an effective crisis response. The report suggests that finance organizations are now reinvesting technology dollars saved through system simplification and cloud migration in the accelerated adoption of digital technologies, such as data management and machine learning, to create a data-centric foundation that can deliver an unobstructed, end-to-end view of financial and operational information, resulting in reduced cost, improved cross-functional collaboration, and greater capacity to focus on creating business value via timely and meaningful decision support.
