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Ever wonder how the cloud is impacting FP&A best practices? Ethan Carlson, CEO of Carlson Management Consulting, discusses how companies can benefit from running company models and forecasts from the cloud.
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“If the only problem in how you’re currently running your models and forecasts is that you need a platform, then yes, you can deploy very quickly. But if you have a need to revamp how you’re running your business, that can take some time.”
The following is an edited abstract from CFO Thought Leader’s “Ask Ethan” podcast featuring Ethan Carlson, CEO, Carlson Management Consulting, and Jack Sweeney, co-host of CFO Thought Leader.
CFOTL: What can companies do to prepare an organization to better leverage what cloud solutions can offer?
ETHAN: You need to look at how quickly a piece of software can deploy. If an application is truly Web-based, when you sign a contract within a day or so you should have access to all that software in a hosted environment. From a usability perspective, if you’ve got the actual set up, it’s measured in hours, though I would say that most cloud, FP&A CPM deployments that we see, usually span the eight- to 12-week time range. But the measurement is hours, it’s not total duration. The idea is if you’re going to spend a few hundred hours deploying a major piece of software in an enterprise setting that’s a fraction of what it used to take. That part now can happen really fast.
The trap companies fall into is thinking that because that can happen so fast, they don’t have to do all the planning and the preparation they necessarily should have done. I always tell organizations that yes, the deployment will happen more rapidly than any other software process or project you’ve been a part of. However, the planning, the thought around your organization, all of the principles of project management and sound execution of change management still apply. So you need to make sure you’ve looked at what you’re currently doing.
If the only problem in how you’re currently running your models and forecasts is that you need a platform, then yes, you can deploy very quickly. But if you have a need to revamp how you’re running your business, that can take some time. So I think that you have to go into it making sure you recognize that all software projects have a process element to them and all the same principles would apply of any deployment.
CFOTL: What does this mean for FP&A, the function at large? Will organizations opt to first deploy certain components of FP&A to the cloud rather than become completely vested in something?
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