Gartner finds that 22 percent of CFOs are personally effective; most are overinvested in finance tasks

Gartner research shows that a mere 22 percent of CFOs achieve a high degree of personal effectiveness, while using a limited set of activities and successful relationships outside the finance department are the biggest contributors to a CFO’s personal effectiveness.

The research was based on more than 100 CFO interviews and it assessed CFO personal performance and effectiveness across 231 attributes to reveal what the most effective CFOs do differently with their time, relationships and teams.

“CFOs tell us they have more demands than ever, but the surprise in this research is just how few activities differentiate the most successful operators from the rest of the pack,” said Peter Nagy, research vice president in the Gartner Finance practice. “The most important relationships that drive high performance in the CFO role are found in the boardroom and where the customers are, not in the finance department.”

Gartner determined CFO personal effectiveness based on how closely a CFO’s organization aligned to efficient growth behaviors, such as positive risk taking to drive long-term growth, as well as the CFO’s ability to meet CEO expectations around revenue growth, margin expansion, return on invested capital and balance sheet health.

As part of the analysis, Gartner studied the average weekly activities of CFOs and found that the average CFO lost one full day of work per week to ineffective activities. The largest misallocation was in how much time CFOs spent working within their own departments.

“CFOs want to reinvent their departments, keep their talent pipelines full and provide services more efficiently to internal business partners, so it’s not surprising that most respondents noted that managing these activities were a huge demand on their time,” said Nagy. “However, none of these activities, even if mastered, ultimately impacted how effective a CFO was in their overall job performance.”

Gartner found that there was no correlation between an organization’s size or industry in how effectively their CFO performed. Within the finance department, a CFO taking personal ownership of finance talent acquisition, mergers and acquisitions strategy, cost management or digital transformation also had no material impact in how effective the CFO was rated in overall job performance.

While time allocated to, and relationships created within, the finance department did not drive CFO personal effectiveness, Gartner identified three key groups of relationships which the most personally effective CFOs focused on nurturing.

The most effective CFOs succeed in constructively challenging their CEOs to achieve better decision-making outcomes. CFOs reported that they were underinvested in time allocated to both overall corporate and finance strategy, potentially negatively impacting their ability to play this role effectively.

Personally effective CFOs are customer-centric and spend more time with external customers than their peers. CFOs surveyed by Gartner reported time spent with customers was the single activity they felt most underinvested in. CFOs who exhibit strong customer relationships are also deeply connected with their sales leaders and play an active role in owning pricing strategy.

The most effective CFOs are plugged into business unit performance. Levers that can be used to achieve this are having business unit CFOs as direct reports, maintaining strong relationships with business unit general managers and a deep involvement with business unit performance metrics.

“While it may be discouraging that just one in five CFOs currently meet the Gartner standard for a high level of personal effectiveness, the good news is that just focusing on a few key relationships outside of finance can drive significant gains in this area,” said Nagy. “The key for CFOs is to be mindful about where they invest their time and with whom, and then develop strategies for protecting those time investments from their many other day-to-day demands.”

Gartner finds that US companies are paying less to entice workers to switch jobs, with active job seeking remains low

U.S. employers are offering less of a compensation increase to attract talent and lure workers from their current jobs, according to Gartner. While historically companies have extended, on average, a 15 percent pay increase to get people to switch jobs, the latest data from Gartner’s third quarter of this year Global Talent Monitor report shows this compensation premium has declined over the past six months to approximately 13 percent.

Gartner’s most recent Global Talent Monitor report also shows that only one-third of currently employed U.S. workers indicated they were actively looking for a new job in the third quarter of this year, below the global average of 40 percent. This U.S. number represents a significant drop from a high of 41 percent in the first quarter of this year, while the international average has remained steady over the same time period.

Additionally, for the second consecutive quarter, 51 percent of U.S. workers reflected their intent to stay with their current employer. This figure is well above the international average of nearly 40 percent.

“The dramatic decline in active job seeking that we witnessed in the second quarter did not rebound much in the third quarter, even as employee business confidence and perceptions of the job market remained stable,” said Brian Kropp, chief of research for Gartner HR practice. “This coupled with companies paying less to entice workers to switch jobs demonstrates additional signs of a tighter U.S. labor market from both the employer and employee perspectives.”

In the third quarter, the number of U.S. workers reporting high discretionary effort on the job — or going above and beyond their regular duties — remained at 21 percent as in the previous quarter, higher than the global average of 17 percent and staying above the 20 percent mark in back-to-back quarters for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2017 and the first quarter of 2018. 

Gartner data reveals that compensation has ranked as the No. 1 reason why U.S. employees leave an employer since the first quarter of 2018, a trend that continued in the third quarter this year. Future career opportunities and people management came in as the second and third reasons, respectively, employees cited for leaving a job.

Although wage increases have remained somewhat stagnant over the past few years, companies have an opportunity to retain talent by providing their workforce with new experiences and development programs to help them learn new skills and strengthen their employability. Managers play a vital role as well; by creating environments in which employees feel better connected to the organization, they help strengthen the bond between the company and workers — and create higher performers.

“Faced with less than ideal compensation increases, U.S. workers are looking for other benefits and value they can extract from their jobs,” said Kropp. “Gartner data shows that even if wage increases remain low, workers will stay on with companies that develop programs which enhance their skills and invest in their professional growth within the company.”

Gartner highlights top 10 trends impacting infrastructure and operations for 2020

Research firm Gartner highlighted on Tuesday trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for to support digital infrastructure in 2020. Analysts presented the findings during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, which is taking place here through Thursday.

“This past year, infrastructure trends focused on how technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) or edge computing might support rapidly growing infrastructure and support business needs at the same time,” said Ross Winser, senior research director at Gartner. “While those demands are still present, our 2020 list of trends reflect their ‘cascade effects,’ many of which are not immediately visible today.”

During his presentation, Winser encouraged I&O leaders to take a step back from “the pressure of keeping the lights on” and prepare for 10 key technologies and trends likely to significantly impact their support of digital infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.

In recent years, Gartner has detected a significant range of automation maturity across clients: Most organizations are automating to some level, in many cases attempting to refocus staff on higher-value tasks. However, automation investments are often made without an overall automation strategy in mind.

“As vendors continue to pop up and offer new automation options, enterprises risk ending up with a duplication of tools, processes and hidden costs that culminate to form a situation where they simply cannot scale infrastructure in the way the business expects,” said Winser. “We think that by 2025, top performing leaders will have employed a dedicated role to steward automation forward and invest to build a proper automation strategy to get away from these ad hoc automation issues.”

“Today’s infrastructure is in many places — colocation, on-premises data centers, edge locations, and in cloud services. The reality of this situation is that hybrid IT will seriously disrupt your incumbent disaster recover (DR) planning if it hasn’t already,” said Winser.

Often, organizations heavily rely on “as a service (aaS)” offerings, where it is easy to overlook the optional features necessary to establish the correct levels of resilience. For instance, by 2021, the root cause of 90 percent of cloud-based availability issues will be the failure to fully use cloud service provider native redundancy capabilities.

“Organizations are left potentially exposed when their heritage DR plans designed for traditional systems have not been reviewed with new hybrid infrastructures in mind. Resilience requirements must be evaluated at design stages rather than treated as an afterthought two years after deployment,” said Winser.

For enterprises trying to scale DevOps, action is needed in 2020 to find an efficient approach for success. Although individual product teams typically master DevOps practices, constraints begin to emerge as organizations attempt to scale the number of DevOps teams.

“We believe that the vast majority of organizations that do not adopt a shared self-service platform approach will find that their DevOps initiatives simply do not scale,” said Winser. “Adopting a shared platform approach enables product teams to draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities, all the while benefiting from high standards of governance and efficiency needed for scale.”

“Last year, we introduced the theme of ’infrastructure is everywhere’ that the business needs it. As technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) are harnessed as competitive differentiators, planning for how explosive data growth will be managed is vital,” said Winser. In fact, by 2022, 60 percent of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers, according to Gartner.

“The attraction of moving selected workloads closer to users for performance and compliance reasons is understandable. Yet we are rapidly heading toward scenarios where these same workloads run across many locations and cause data to be harder to protect. Cascade effects of data movement combined with data growth will hit I&O folks hard if they are not preparing now.”

Successful IoT projects have many considerations, and no single vendor is likely to provide a complete end-to-end solution. 

“I&O must get involved in the early planning discussions of the IoT puzzle to understand the proposed service and support model at scale. This will avoid the cascade effect of unforeseen service gaps, which could cause serious headaches in future,” said Winser.

Distributed cloud is defined as the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while operation, governance, updates and the evolution of those services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.

“Emerging options for distributed cloud will enable I&O teams to put public cloud services in the location of their choosing, which could be really attractive for leaders looking to modernize using public cloud,” said Winser.

However, Winser points out that the nascent nature of many of these solutions means a wide range of considerations must not be overlooked. “Enthusiasm for new services like AWS Outposts, Microsoft Azure Stack or Google Anthos must be matched early on with diligence in ensuring the delivery model for these solutions is fully understood by I&O teams who will be involved in supporting them.”

“Customer standards for the experience delivered by I&O capabilities are higher than ever,” said Winser. “Previous ‘value adds’ like seamless integration, rapid responses and zero downtime are now simply baseline customer expectations.”

Winser warned leaders that as digital business systems reach deeper into I&O infrastructures, the potential impact of even the smallest of I&O issues expands. “If the customer experience is good, you might grow in mind and market share over time; but if the experience is bad, the impacts are immediate and could potentially impact corporate reputation rather than just customer satisfaction.”

Low-code is a visual development approach to application development that is becoming increasingly appealing to business units. It enables developers of varied experience levels to create applications for web and mobile with little or no coding experience, largely driving a “self-service” model for business units instead of turning to central IT for a formal project plan.

In many cases, network teams have excelled in delivering highly available networks, which is often achieved through cautious change management. At the same time, the pace of change is tough for I&O to keep up with, and there are no signs of things slowing down.

Winser said that the continued pressure to keep the lights shining brightly has created unexpected issues for the network. “Cultural challenges of risk avoidance, technical debt and vendor lock-in all mean that some network teams face a tough road ahead. 2020 needs to be the time for cultural shifts, as investment in new network technologies is only part of the answer.”

As the realities of hybrid digital infrastructures kick in, the scale and complexity of managing them is becoming a more pressing issue for IT leaders.

Organizations should investigate the concept of HDIM, which looks to address the primary management issues of a hybrid infrastructure. 

“This is an emerging area, so organizations should be wary of vendors who say they have tools that offer a single solution to all their hybrid management issues today. Over the next few years, though, we expect vendors focused on HDIM to deliver improvements that enable IT leaders to get the answers they need far faster than they can today.”

Gartner reveals that just 22 percent of CFOs are personally effective; while most are overinvested in finance tasks

Only 22 percent of CFOs achieve a high degree of personal effectiveness, and Gartner Inc. research shows that a limited set of activities and relationships outside the finance department are the biggest contributors to a CFO’s personal effectiveness.

The research was based on more than 100 CFO interviews and it assessed CFO personal performance and effectiveness across 231 attributes to reveal what the most effective CFOs do differently with their time, relationships and teams.

Gartner determined CFO personal effectiveness based on how closely a CFO’s organization aligned to efficient growth behaviors, such as positive risk taking to drive long-term growth, as well as the CFO’s ability to meet CEO expectations around revenue growth, margin expansion, return on invested capital and balance sheet health.

As part of the analysis, Gartner studied the average weekly activities of CFOs and found that the average CFO lost one full day of work per week to ineffective activities. The largest misallocation was in how much time CFOs spent working within their own departments.

“CFOs want to reinvent their departments, keep their talent pipelines full and provide services more efficiently to internal business partners, so it’s not surprising that most respondents noted that managing these activities were a huge demand on their time,” said Mr. Nagy. “However, none of these activities, even if mastered, ultimately impacted how effective a CFO was in their overall job performance.”

Gartner found that there was no correlation between an organization’s size or industry in how effectively their CFO performed. Within the finance department, a CFO taking personal ownership of finance talent acquisition, mergers and acquisitions strategy, cost management or digital transformation also had no material impact in how effective the CFO was rated in overall job performance.

“CFOs tell us they have more demands than ever, but the surprise in this research is just how few activities differentiate the most successful operators from the rest of the pack,” said Peter Nagy, research vice president in Gartner Finance practice. “The most important relationships that drive high performance in the CFO role are found in the boardroom and where the customers are, not in the finance department.”

Gartner expects 80 percent of marketers to drop their personalization efforts by 2025

Gartner expects that, by 2025, 80 percent of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both. In fact, 27 percent of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization — revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection.

Marketers face other impediments to personalization success including the continuing decline in consumer trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers erected by tech companies. While personalization comprises 14 percent of the marketing budget, more than one in four marketing leaders cite technology as a major hurdle to personalization.

Gartner has a number of recommendations for marketing leaders evaluating their personalization efforts, including leveraging a pilot or proof of concept (POC) with a vendor before investing in a personalization tool, while returning to the basics and test tailored recommendations at the segment level to avoid unnecessary or premature investment in a personalization engine. It also helps grow personalization efforts from a set of tactics or tools to a capability by focusing on strategic planning, use case development and consent management as part of a personalization roadmap.

The effort also helps collaborate with cross-functional teams to align personalization efforts and increase momentum. Sharing control of personalization efforts can lead to shared insight and expand collective impact and ROI.

Other Gartner predictions to help marketers adjust to rapidly evolving customer behaviors and plan accordingly include expectations that by 2023, chief marketing officer (CMO) budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know; by 2024, artificial intelligence identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements viewed; by 2022, 25 percent of marketing departments will have a dedicated behavioral scientist or ethnographer as part of their full-time staff; and in 2023, one-third of all brand public relations disasters will result from data ethics failures.

“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” said Charles Golvin, senior director analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice. “However, this quest has failed to meet marketers’ ambitions and, in some cases, has backfired, as consumers both directly and indirectly reject brands’ overtures.”