3 New Approaches for the Data Driven Chief Financial Officer
Dashboards that incorporate color scaling, trend indicators, conditional highlighting, and
sparklines help focus attention on areas for a user to drill deeper and develop insight (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Sample Dashboard – Family Office
When the reports are converted from a static state to a dynamic state,
users have a tool at their fingertips to ask and answer their own questions.
Changing the role of finance staff in the family office
The role of finance is to ensure that the data included on a dashboard has integrity and that the
right metrics are presented. The adoption of enabling technologies enhances reporting integrity
by maintaining the live connection to the underlying sources of data alleviating finance people
of this time-consuming activity. As a result, these types of technology change the role of how
finance people are deployed.
Finance resources spend less time gathering, reconciling, aggregating, and cleansing data. Their
contribution is upgraded and now begins emphasizing the review of data to identify errors, the
analysis of data to uncover insights, and establishing KPIs that measure and communicate
