Some aspects of the digitization debate have a somewhat unpleasant ring to them from hip Berlin startup folks – and yet are worth considering in their respective contexts.
One of these aspects is user experience. A topic that has long been considered old hat in the startup sphere – but still often gets people talking: Shouldn’t functionality always take precedence over appearance?
In the joint whitepaper by main incubator and Valsights, we take this very idea as our starting point and try to come up with a derivation that hopefully makes it clear that UX is very much about functionality – and that user experience, especially in the finance and controlling environment, has a special justification.
Finance Excellence could be defined as follows: The added value and security of enterprise performance management by experts in their field who are increasingly perceived – and want to be perceived – as strategic management partners rather than bean counters; the full exploitation and expansion of the potential in the finance function.
If we want to achieve finance excellence, a number of methodological, technological and fundamental conditions must be met.
Modern finance and controlling software lays the foundation for finance excellence.
But how do software vendors know how to design software to meet this demand?
By putting a few core questions at the very beginning:
- What exactly is expected of the finance function?
- And what do controlling managers and CFOs need to exceed these expectations?
- What is expected from a software solution?
So why is user experience so central? The short answer: because we’ve taken too little care of them for too long. For the detailed answer, we start a bit further ahead: The whitepaper “Finance Excellence = User Experience Excellence” is based on the presentation with the same title by main incubator CEO Matthias Lais, given at the Horváth & Partners Finance Excellence conference.
More info: This was the Finance Excellence conference.
