Every Friday, we will select a few in-depth articles from the week that we think are worth your valuable time as a construction financial manager (CFM). We look for compelling articles not only about financial topics, but about business, technology, and life, that challenges you to think about your role as a CFM in different ways. We’d love to hear from you about how we’re doing, and to have you join our community by subscribing to receive this weekly post by email. Follow #CFMReview.
Kimberly-Clark CFO Pushes Entire Company to “Think Like a CFO.” Mark Buthman, Kimberly-Clark CFO, saw a problem with his 1,600 person finance department, and that problem resonates with every corporate leader: “The further an employee is away from you…the less clear the person is about what you expect of him or her.” They started a program called “The Power of a CFO,” and it is designed to make every financial employee within the company to think about their own projects and challenges from the perspective of the executive suite. The profile of Buthman and the Power of a CFO program is discussed in a great 2-part series written by David McCann at CFO.com: Kimberly-Clark Finance Chief Tells Staff: Think Like A CFO. It’s a mindset change initiative, and a quote from Buthman at the article’s conclusion sums it up best and is a compelling challenge to CFMs at every level of an organization: “Every finance organization is on a journey. We all want to be best in class. Years ago, we were controllers. Then we aspired to become business partners. Power of a CFO is about becoming business leaders.”
Experience is Nice, but Millennials Bring Companies A Different Kind of Advantage. ENR’s Viewpoints articles can be hit or miss, but chalk up one in the win category for the publication and a new author this week, Ralph Motto, of Graycor Services, who wrote “Firms Need Millennials Now More Than Ever.” A line from this article that summarizes Motto’s point up best is as follows: “Nothing can replace decades of experience that a designer, engineer or contractor can bring to a client for a complicated, high-value project. But young professionals well-versed in the language of new technologies can bring a different kind of advantage.” Technology is moving faster than the speed of sound, and as explored recently in Innovative CFMs Will Win in the Recovering Economy, those companies who can leverage new technologies and opportunities will have an advantage against those who cannot. The value of millennials to meet this challenge is hard to understate.
Thinking About Moving To The Cloud Giving You A Headache? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, in the midst of huge swarming to the cloud, large companies are delaying their move to the cloud. In the Journal’s “Why Big Companies Delay Using The Cloud for Some Applications,” the reasons for delay appear to be a mixture of ability, complexity, security, and desire. Xerox CIO Stephen Little, for example, is quoted that “thinking about the complexity of moving the ERP systems to the cloud ‘makes my head hurt.’ This does not mean that cloud-based platforms will not win in the end. SAP, Oracle, and major ERP providers are seeing more and more demand and getting more and more revenue from their new cloud products, and even though companies are delaying full-adoption, they are still adopting cloud-technologies for ancillary functions. Further, when it comes to building future infrastructure, the choice is cloud over on-site systems.
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