Should More CFOs be Involved in Software Development?

Today’s CFO is a business visionary, advisor and IT expert, and that’s in addition to the traditional accounting, tax and planning responsibilities.

Yet, wearing this many hats may not be enough; the list of demands deserves another addition to leverage the CFO’s deep expertise: more CFOs need to be involved in the software development process. We don’t need them to actually do the coding; instead, we need them heavily involved in the design and workflow that is so critical for today’s software solutions, especially in business-related applications.

The CFO is trained to picture every detailed step when reviewing a process. The CFO foresees bottlenecks in operational activities few others are trained to find. As a result, the CFO brings a new level of clarity to software development, eliminating many issues that plague today’s software applications, most of which are deluged with poor processes.

Ask a CFO to use most any software program and he or she will quickly ask questions the engineers may not have thought of, yet. “Why doesn’t this program do xyz?” “Why can’t I see abc at the same time I am looking at this page?” “The following data is missing; and how come we cannot integrate this with our other systems?” As a result, issues in process, access to data and interactions with other applications immediately pop out.

Why does this shortfall in vison happen in software development? Typically, software is heavily developed by engineers and programmers who have never touched or worked with the actual process for which they are programming. For example, since programmers have not walked a day in the life of the accounting or operations teams, they just cannot bring any real life experience to the process. Developers certainly try to do their jobs, but they do them by using strategy and planning sessions with product managers and other team leaders to collect data in order to code the program. However, this process falls deeply short. We still end up with huge gaps between potential vision and the end product.

If the CFO were to take ownership in the software development process, their end-user experience would help development teams avoid these common workflow issues. However, who has the time? The CFO cannot effectively add much-needed value to software development while still performing all other full-time, regular duties. It’s just too much to expect and ask.

Instead, we should be asking our experienced CFOs to jump into the startup environment and be deeply responsible, not for the accounting but for software development process and end- user experience aspects. Too often, I believe teams underestimate the challenges to develop great software and further complicate matters by not bringing in an industry expert, such as the CFO, to lead the process.

I believe our job as accounting professionals is to encourage many of our colleagues to move the CFO-software development perspective forward. Today’s CFO suite of software applications is due for a dramatic change – the technology is there and development cost puts it in reach. All we need, then, is to put more visionaries with practical experience into the process. We will build much better applications to meet our challenges.

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Don Kalkofen, CPA, is CEO and co-founder of Simplifier, software designed to make accounting applications intelligent by delivering insight to travel spend management. For more information, contact Don at don.kalkofen@simplifiercorp.com.