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.”

BridgeClimb adopts RingCentral’s cloud communications and contact centre offerings to enable multichannel communications

BridgeClimb, the operator of Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge experience, adopted RingCentral Australia to enable multichannel communications and customer service. Looking to replace its legacy on-premise infrastructure, BridgeClimb has deployed RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Centre solutions across its entire staff. The implementation and cutover took place in October this year.

The RingCentral Office solution provides voice, video, online meetings and team messaging to support the communications needs for all BridgeClimb’s staff members. With this solution, BridgeClimb has replaced at least five different internal systems that they had been running previously to provide these various capabilities. 

RingCentral Contact Centre provides BridgeClimb’s customer service team multichannel capabilities with email, phone and chat in a universal queue. It is integrated with RingCentral Office and provides extensive performance reporting and analytics across the entire platform.

RingCentral Australia, provider of global enterprise cloud communications, collaboration, and contact centre solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of RingCentral Inc. The RingCentral platform empowers employees to work better together, from any location, on any device, and via any mode to serve customers, improving business efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

It also features unified voice, video meetings, team messaging, digital customer engagement, and integrated contact centre solutions for enterprises globally. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with business apps and enables customers to customise business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.

RingCentral’s Professional Services team completed the design, configuration and implementation of the unified communications and contact centre solutions. It took just seven weeks from the initial meeting between RingCentral and BridgeClimb to complete the cutover of the new solution.

BridgeClimb no longer has any single points of communications failure and no reliance on any physical infrastructure. RingCentral has a high availability, fully-redundant cloud and telecommunications infrastructure, end-to-end performance monitoring and SLAs, and real-time disaster recovery.

As a people-first organisation, the employee experience is critical for BridgeClimb. RingCentral’s user interface is very intuitive with similar functionality to the consumer communications apps that are already very familiar to most users. This made the transition to RingCentral a very smooth experience for BridgeClimb’s staff, and also ensures easy onboarding and training for new employees.

With RingCentral’s subscription model and no communications hardware requirements or user onboarding constraints, BridgeClimb can continue to grow its business without any technology limitations.

With BridgeClimb currently undergoing an extensive digital transformation, RingCentral’s ability to integrate ‘out of the box’ with many other systems and applications was another critical decision factor. RingCentral is already integrated with BridgeClimb’s Microsoft Office 365 environment, and the company will be looking to other integrations in the future, including a new CRM solution.

“We’re delighted to be associated with the iconic Sydney tourism experience BridgeClimb, and really looking forward to seeing how the BridgeClimb team leverages RingCentral’s open platform for further innovation and business transformation as they roll out new digital applications and services,” said Peter Hughes, regional sales vice president for Asia Pacific, RingCentral.

Slalom and AWS bring in Launch Centers to help enterprises accelerate business transformation, modernize IT services

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, and Slalom, announced a new multi-year, global, strategic collaboration relationship, to build joint AWS | Slalom Launch Centers (Launch Centers) that will accelerate customers’ migration to the cloud and help them modernize their IT services. 

As part of the relationship, three Launch Centers will initially open in Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta with plans to open more centers around the world within in the next three years. The Launch Centers will help customers to accelerate their IT modernization and migration strategies to achieve fully optimized, cloud based operating models.

The Launch Centers uniquely combine AWS Professional Services, a global team of AWS experts who help customers reach their desired outcomes with the cloud, with Slalom business transformation, software engineering, and analytics capabilities to address these customer transformations. 

Mutual AWS and Slalom customers can temporarily relocate their IT teams to work from designated Launch Centers, to reap the benefits of working directly with experts in a secure, immersive, collaborative environment that enables a culture of innovation and learning.

The Launch Centers will provide a variety of offerings, including expediting customers’ initial digital launches to the AWS Cloud, and a customized approach to scale their competencies and processes for the future on AWS. 

The AWS and Slalom multi-disciplinary experts can deliver a comprehensive path to the cloud, taking customers through a series of steps, from defining their business strategies and building their cloud migration roadmaps, to optimizing their move to the cloud and implementing a modernized approach for ongoing operational excellence. They will also guide customers through business rationalization and organizational change management, as well as help them to overcome technical readiness concerns, by providing training on how to manage their infrastructure.

Rimini Street announces availability of application management services for Oracle database and applications

Rimini Street, provider of enterprise software products and services, announced this week global availability of its Application Management Services (AMS) for Oracle, which includes coverage for Oracle Database, Middleware and a wide range of Oracle applications including E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

In addition to leveraging Rimini Street’s Support Services for Oracle that replaces expensive and less robust software vendor annual support with a more responsive and comprehensive support offering, clients can now have Rimini Street manage their Oracle systems day-to-day with an integrated application management and support service provided by a single trusted vendor. 

As an integrated service, Rimini Street can provide clients a better model, better people, and better outcomes with higher satisfaction and significant savings of time, labor and money.

Rimini Street Application Management Services for Oracle includes system administration, operational support, health monitoring and enhancement support.

According to industry analysts, the global market for application management services is approximately $82 billion and expected to grow more than 5 percent annually. While a growing market, traditional AMS support models are flawed and continue to be ranked as “poor.” 

Contributing to the low ratings is the inefficiency of the multi-vendor support model, as well as complex issue tracking and slower case resolution by resources that lack the necessary software knowledge and experience to resolve challenges and drive better outcomes.

Additionally, AMS models are getting increasingly complex, with disparate application management and support layers provided by multiple vendors, often leaving the internal IT teams mediating vendor escalations rather than providing value.

Rimini Street’s integrated application management and support services model provides clients with a seamless service, managed by an expert service delivery team consisting of experienced and proven engineers and an engagement team consisting of an Engagement Manager, a seasoned Primary Support Engineer (PSE), and an Enterprise Account Manager.

“Constellation sees a massive customer satisfaction gap in the Application Management Services market. The battle for price over value, process over better outcomes has led to a broken market,” said R “Ray" Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. “Clients seek partners who can deliver high quality AMS support for Oracle, addressing a strong need in the market for a reliable, expert approach to application management services with an integrated solution that helps clients optimize their IT operations.”

“Our integrated management and support service is a unique and valuable competitive offering for Oracle licensees that includes the capabilities they need in a model that will deliver more savings, higher satisfaction, better value and better outcomes,” said Seth A. Ravin, Rimini Street CEO. “With our integrated applications management and support services, Oracle licensees around the world can let Rimini Street manage and support their Oracle database and application software while focusing their internal resources, time and budget on business transformation initiatives that will create competitive advantage and drive growth.”

In August, Rimini Street announced global availability of its Application Management Services (AMS) for SAP enterprise software. In addition to leveraging Rimini Street's Support Services for SAP that replaces expensive and lower-value software vendor annual support, clients can now have Rimini Street run their SAP systems with a turnkey solution that integrates Application Management and Support Services for SAP enterprise software.

Rimini Street has been delivering its integrated Application Management and Support Services for SAP to clients in North and South America, and today announces the global availability of its Application Management Services for SAP to match the existing global availability of its Support Services for SAP. 

Rimini Street's AMS for SAP is comprised of the following core capabilities: operational support including integrated incident resolution, case management, and root cause analysis to optimize ongoing operations; systems administration; SAP Basis support; system health monitoring with proactive analysis, preventative system recommendations and event detection; and enhancement support for complex SAP software landscapes.