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.”

Data Dynamics set to buy Infintus Innovations to provide analytics for data visibility, compliance, governance

Data Dynamics announced this week its intent to acquire Infintus Innovations, with the acquisition to close before the end of the year. 

Infintus is a data analytics company that automates and analyzes unstructured data using AI. The addition of Infintus enables Data Dynamics to provide content level analytics, thus offering more granularity into the visibility of data and complementing its metadata-driven analytics, policy-based movement, and management capabilities. 

Together, Data Dynamics' and Infintus' capabilities enable dynamic data for the digital enterprise. The combination of solutions provides intelligent data management solutions where data-driven strategy accelerates revenue, compliance, agility, and intelligence.

Data Dynamics prioritizes data visibility, compliance, and governance with the acquisition of Infintus innovations. The M&A strengthens Data Dynamics' value offerings by adding depth and granularity to its data analytics capabilities, and drives innovation and growth within the customer's data environment, Data Dynamics manages data life cycle from understanding data to data location optimization 

With revenue, compliance, and optimization being the top 3 initiatives in the CEO's agenda, this acquisition is ideal to receive explosive growth within the market and across all industries. This growth opportunity is further aided by enterprises that are looking to adopt hybrid cloud solutions and require complete data visibility for business-driven placement of data workloads.