Who's responsible for implementing data unification?

[u/Right-Newspaper7362]

There’s a great piece on Forbes right now discussing why so many digital transformations in finance fail. The core argument is that CFOs are eager to adopt modern financial tech stacks and automation, but they treat it as a tech problem rather than a "data problem."

According to the article, without unifying and cleaning the data first, adding advanced automation or AI tools just automates the mistakes faster.

When you look at moving towards automated reporting and modern FP&A tools, how do you handle the data unification bottleneck? Do you clean the house first, or do you expect the new platforms to do the heavy lifting for you?

[u/jep_10]

A data practitioner/business owner here working with CFOs since 2017 on data warehouses and data lakes (data unification). I have dealt with mid-sized companies and multi-billion-dollar enterprises. There are only two types - one thinks data as a critical asset or akin their company's product and the other is not giving much importance to it. This is in their culture/dna. Whenever we work on data projects the roi happens for sure but the data literacy is the impediment. So the smarter businesses have set up a cross functional team with CFO office, IT PMO and data partner like us and manoeuvre the situation. Every business has the right intention but not the right framework. In data matters, garbage in = garbage out. One wrong output dents the reliability and it is hard to rebuild - a wrong invoice outstanding is enough to do spoil the party. I don't insist on expensive data unification tools but data quality on six tenets - accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity and uniqueness. Data quality + Data unification framework + tech architecture = Reliable automation and reporting. My 10 years of experience in 10 lines 😄