BELL FINANCE
team , starting with our CFO all the way through to the actual investment in the Program as well as in bringing people together to provide a different way of working for our finance function .”
Beginning with leadership sponsorship , one of the first things they did in the early phases was to focus on people and to find those within their finance function in possession of leading edge skills in some of these technologies and to bring them together , “ and that really formed the nucleus of our centre of excellence ”.
“ As we gathered those folks , along with some of the work that they were doing , into a single team , we started to build a team vision – and to create a roadmap that we then started to execute as a part of our longer-term strategy .”
The Centre of Excellence ’ s core capabilities The CoE acts as the brain as well as the executive centre of the finance transformation ’ s nervous system at Bell , and there are core capabilities and skills that determine how effective it is in bringing about this transformation .
Kirsten proposes that they are categorised broadly in two areas : “ There are behavioural capabilities and technical capabilities that are required .”
“ On the behavioural side , for any centre of excellence , you need to have an innovative , strategic and critical thinking cap on . It ensures that we keep driving our transformation mandate , but also helps keep our lives interesting . Also on the behavioural side is solid engagement and stakeholder management capability . It ' s critical that we have a strong stakeholder engagement capability in the CoE so that we continue to keep our finance partners involved , engaged , testing and adopting the solution , and of course , collaboration is absolutely key .”
“ On the technical side ( and I don ' t think this will come as a surprise ), you need to have an intimate understanding of the finance organisation . As we ' re a finance CoE , this is different from what you would see in other enterprises – typically as a Centre of Excellence with an analytics focus . You naturally need the technical Data mining / Wrangling and Visualisation competence , but the solution development is crisper with a good foundational finance understanding .“
66 March 2023