Dive Brief:

• CFOs are continuing to take on more and more responsibilities in their organizations, with finance chiefs reporting “ownership” or “co-ownership” of areas like IT, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation as well as the traditional finance function, a recent survey by Gartner found.
• However, as finance leaders see their roles shifting in the face of these responsibilities, it’s critically important for leaders to really think “through what the role of the CFO is, in line with their finance team,” said Mallory Bulman, CFO advisory leader in the Gartner Finance practice. “You want to make sure that there's good alignment and clarity around who's doing what in teams.”  
• Finance chiefs are being asked to lead technology and data-related segments of their organizations, with 76% of CFOs citing enterprise data and analytics strategy as an area of ownership or co-ownership, the survey of 251 finance chiefs found. Meanwhile, 70% pointed to enterprise risk, while 68% said corporate strategy was a key priority.

Dive Insight:

Good alignment among the finance team is crucial to give CFOs the bandwidth they need to focus on the strategic tasks they are now being asked to lead, Bulman said.

“When the alignment is out of whack, you'll see a CFO who gets pulled into firefighting on issues, or digital transformation is slowed, or the size of the finance function is out of alignment because staff are spending their time on things they shouldn't be spending their time on,” she said.

As CFOs are shifting their focus, they are also asking for more from their finance team, Gartner found. In order to juggle their expanding array of responsibilities, finance leaders also need to think strategically about their hiring strategies and what skills they need, Bulman said.

“As you're looking at your team, it's really about…‘how can you build a team who can complement you, but also achieve what you are trying to achieve as a function?’” she said of how finance chiefs should think of hiring.

That can be a tall order at a time when the accounting and financial spaces are still facing a shortage of skilled talent. Staffing challenges are still expected to have a “significant impact” on the accounting industry this year, at a time when many companies are placing more attention on improving profitability, according to a recent study by Wolters Kluwer.

As more organizations begin to implement emerging technologies such as AI, for that matter, the organizational structure — and needed skills — of the finance function is also likely to change. The way CFOs are looking for talent inside of the finance function is “probably going to evolve as finance becomes more digital,” Bulman said. AI is still occupying a significant amount of CFOs’ time and attention, with 43% of finance leaders pointing to the technology as a key area where they have ownership or co-ownership, Gartner found. That’s putting a premium on digital and data-related skills inside of the finance function.

With AI and related technologies becoming more widely utilized, the makeup of the future finance team “will really shift where we may see as much as half of finance be digital talent, not core finance talent, depending on the digital profile and digital footprint of the organization,” Bulman said.