The role of today's CFO has evolved beyond recognition. While CFOs still oversee economic stability and growth, competitive leadership and operational efficiency, the use of Big Data for effective decision-making has many CFOs questioning where their role ends and the CIO's role begins. While CFOs can learn much from the CIO's technical know-how, the ability to effectively tackle and leverage Big Data is not about having the right technology but the right strategy -- a function that fits squarely within the CFO's wheelhouse.

Few organizations today have seen the return they expected from their investment in business analytics. To a large extent, this arises from a strategy built to investigate questions that reflect the needs of a particular department instead of the needs of the business as a whole. CFOs need to start thinking differently about how analytics is applied to enable insight-based decisions across every aspect of the business. That means taking an end-to-end view of each process: order-to-cash, source-to-contract, procure-to-pay, quote-to-deliver, marketing campaign effectiveness and so on. Forward-thinking CFOs are achieving this by working closely with the CIO to take a centralized approach to enterprise-wide analytics and insights -- an approach called business process analytics.