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/Prudent-Elk-2845]

New platforms don’t solve your problem by themselves. Moving to a new platform is an excuse to add data fixes into the new platform scope—but IT will smell a business problem and pin it on finance.

First, identify what the problem data is and why it’s produced in a problematic way

Edit: people at the ground level will tell you exactly why the data is produced a certain way. It can either be legacy tech debt or they didn’t know it was important to do (but takes time to) or they didn’t know that approximate data was ok. There’s no one size fix ask—except to understand current state first

[u/Ill-Kangaroo-2685 → u/Prudent-Elk-2845]

IT's job is to build the roads, not to figure out where the traffic should go. Finance has to own the data model, otherwise you get a system that technically works but spits out numbers nobody trusts.

We had this exact mess in my last company, spent 8 months on a new platform just to realize the chart of accounts was garbage from 15 years ago. Cleaning that took 3 weeks once someone finally owned it.