In order to gain funding for big data and analytics projects, IT and business leaders often must gain the approval of the chief financial officer. That can often be a tall order, since other technology investments are increasingly competing for the CFO’s attention.
Even though investments in business intelligence and analytics remain a high priority for CFOs, business and finance applications continue to gain in importance among financial leaders, according to the 2013 Gartner Financial Executives International CFO Technology Study.
CFOs want compelling business cases to justify investments in big data and big data analytics.
One effective way to validate the merits of such investments is by demonstrating how data that’s generated and gathered from beyond the four walls of the company and examined through the use of predictive analytics can help reveal insights about market conditions, customer behaviors, and other trends that can generate new opportunities for obtaining competitive advantage.
Providing the CFO with a well-reasoned business case for furthering investment in big data and analytics can help gain his support. A big data analytics champion can provide the CFO with a persuasive case study that clearly demonstrates the business challenge that the company sought to address and the ROI or other business value that was gleaned from the project.
For instance, analysis of market and customer data by a regional bank may reveal that changes in the amount of equity consumers have in their homes could trigger new opportunities for providing high-value, low-risk consumers offers for home equity loans before such trends are picked up by rival banks.
Such a discovery could give the bank a competitive advantage by beating rivals and providing attractive, yet profitable offers to high-value customers and prospects that a CFO would likely find highly persuasive.
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