CFOs try not to get lost in data: Aurecon

While CFOs have wider visibility of the business than ever before, access to information can be a blessing and a curse as leaders work to interpret what it relevant to the business.

Andrew Muller, CFO at Aurecon told Digital Nation Australia, “The trick in that has been how to not get distracted by getting lost in data, but making sure that we're putting stuff that is important and really does make a difference in front of people at the right time so they can make decisions.”

The challenge in gaining visibility is when there is too much information and not enough specificity.

Muller said as Aurecon has onboarded digital tools such as the Workday platform, the focus has been on strategically determining what information is made available through dashboards.

“We deliberately went through an exercise in designing dashboards a couple of years back where we did this direct link between here's our strategy, therefore, if that's what it is, this is what we care about, this is what’s important. What do we need to know that supports that? Then making sure our dashboards and our KPIs and metrics actually answered those questions,” he said.

Muller said that focusing the information dashboards specifically on relevant information has streamlined the process for users, so that they don’t have to “wade through” information.
While CFOs might not necessarily be the chief technologists in the business, Muller insisted that they need to be experimental and open to innovation.

“From a CFO perspective, I don't profess to understand all the intricacies or the detail of the technologies necessarily, but I do know enough to be dangerous, but I also know enough to embrace what’s coming,” he said.

“We’ve tried to experiment and learn as these things come up. You go, ‘Okay, well, let's give this dashboard a try’ or ‘Let's look at this automation piece to see whether that works’ and just start to build from there.”