Gartner’s CFO Podcast

Learn how high-performing leaders are creating government finance offices of the future.

Farrah Watson, director analyst at Gartner, advises executive and senior finance leaders in the government and nonprofit sectors looking to enhance efficiency, create transparency and meaningfully communicate information to stakeholders. She brings 20 years of leadership and management experience in the areas of budgeting, planning and forecasting, including expert-level knowledge in Oracle Hyperion.

In this episode of Gartner’s CFO Podcast, Nisha Bhandare, VP analyst at Gartner, breaks down what is a finance technology roadmap. She explains why this is something a CFO must sit down and think about, the benefits of a well-drawn roadmap, as well as the drawbacks if CFOs don’t get it right.

Nisha Bhandare is a Vice President, Analyst, in Gartner’s Finance Research and Advisory Practice. She advises clients who are in the midst or embarking on a finance transformation journey, primarily in the areas of finance technology strategy and implementation, ERP deployment, and invoice-to-cash processes. Nisha previously worked in progressive leadership roles in financial planning and analysis, controllership, and finance transformation and operations. She built world-class solutions to increase analytical and forecast accuracy, productivity and efficiencies through automation, shared services, legal entity and ERP simplification.

In this episode, Gartner Managing Vice President Craig Risberg recommends five resolutions for CFOs:

• Stop using spreadsheets for budgets, 
• Make job descriptions actually stand out to digital talent, 
• Create a sense of belonging for your growing finance IT community, 
• Try (and likely fail at) more finance AI projects, 
• Personally invest in developing finance’s target operating model.

Persistent inflation, scarce and expensive talent, and global supply constraints have created a seemingly unpredictable operating environment. In this episode, Regina Crowder, Senior Director Analyst at  Gartner, shares key considerations and things to avoid when making effective forecasts.

Regina Crowder is a Senior Director Analyst in Gartner’s finance practice. She engages with senior finance leaders to identify areas of opportunity and helps implement best practice solutions that improve functional effectiveness and enhance business performance. Regina’s primary areas of focus are financial planning and analysis, budgeting and forecasting. Before Gartner, Regina served as a vice president of corporate finance at Tech Data, and was responsible for the company's global financial transformation initiative, which included worldwide financial planning and forecasting processes.

As a Vice President of Research at Gartner, Dennis Gannon fields inquiries every day from CFOs and other senior finance leaders for his perspective on how to best run their functions and help the organization maximize returns on capital. His areas of expertise include capital allocation, cost optimization, finance business partnership, and CFO personal effectiveness. Dennis works with Gartner research teams to address the shared challenges of finance leaders and brings that research to life in one-on-one and group interactions with Gartner clients.

In this episode, we share Gartner’s latest insights from our Supply Chain Symposium Keynote and Monthly Supply Chain Alert for September 2022. We discuss how CFOs can support and drive changes related to labor, materials, logistics, and inventories and set their business up to navigate continued pressures.

Thomas O’Connor is a vice president team manager in the Gartner Supply Chain Group. His team researches and advises clients on a wide range of supply chain focused topics, including supply chain strategy, industry trends, digital commerce, sustainability, packaging, returns and more. Thomas also leads and hosts The Gartner Supply Chain Podcast, while his data and findings have been featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Fortune, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and more than 30 other media outlets. He is based out of Sydney, Australia.

Listen to this episode to learn how CFOs and C-suite leaders should be addressing four key challenges in today’s labor market: 

1. Strong demand for talent, increasing compensation expectations, and difficulty recruiting and hiring 
2. Return to the office and hybrid work 
3. The “Great Resignation” and shifting employee values 
4. Diversity, equity and inclusion, and defining the value your organization provides to employees and the world

We share the latest costs that companies are cutting, digital investments they are making, and how we see the best CFOs setting up for success during the recession. We then drill into nine specific actions related to resource allocation, securing talent, and driving digital acceleration during the recession. 

Finance functions have an opportunity to move from automated to autonomous, and shifting mindsets is the hardest barrier to overcome in that journey. CFOs must shift their thinking in three ways to lead their functions into the future.

Emily Connelly is a research director in Gartner’s finance practice. She led research for the 2022 Gartner CFO and Finance Executive Conference Keynote Address, “The Path to Autonomous Finance.” Emily also leads research on finance transformation and shared services.

David Furlonger is a Distinguished Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner’s CEO and Digital Business Leaders research group. David is responsible for conducting research and developing publications aimed at helping CEOs and other executive leaders better understand how long-term societal, business and technology trends impact industries and their enterprise, in particular due to digital innovations. 

Additional research areas include: blockchain business cases and strategy, digital assets/tokenization/DeFi, decentralization and ecosystems and the evolution of the programmable economy. 

In October 2019, David published a Harvard book: “The Real Business of Blockchain: How Leaders Can Create Value in a New Digital Age.”