In uncertain economic times, businesses need to focus on intelligence and insight.
Data analytics can be a game-changer for helping businesses see potential outcomes and make decisions.
RSM is embracing change through data-driven decision intelligence to improve efficiency and productivity.

Businesses are evolving, digital transformation efforts are accelerating, and decision makers are facing what seems like constant economic uncertainty. With so many headwinds, the ability to see around corners, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks before they become crises requires decision intelligence at scale.

"The office of finance sits at the heart of decision making across all businesses," said Kevin Rubin, chief finance officer at Alteryx, the analytics cloud platform company providing analytics automation to over 8,000 global customers. "The ability to move beyond manual data processing and turbo-charge insight generation is critical to facilitating a real-time understanding of the state of the business and gaining clarity in a landscape of uncertainty. Finance teams are closest to your business, but the ability to analyze company data for the trends and insights needed to make challenging decisions and react to changing trends at speed requires accessible analytics capabilities to arrive at data-driven insights in real-time."

"This agility is one of the key opportunities for modern finance teams," added Paul Herring, chief innovation officer at RSM International, the leading provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services to middle market businesses with a huge network of people around the world. "We're an organization that provides expert insight. Now with the way that technology's advanced, we can more effectively leverage the experience of our whole organization than we did before."

Streamlining this process by working with Alteryx has, of course, led to efficiencies, which Herring said is another big opportunity that comes from automation. "Efficiency is much more attainable now than it was, and that drive for efficiency goes hand-in-hand with quality — the reliability of the information that's used for decision-making," he added.

Navigating uncertainty in the financial services industry

It's been a big shift for RSM, driven by Sarah Belsham, a partner who joined the firm in the UK four years ago and kicked off a program to set out a data analytics strategy. "We have some really bright analysts who were pushing spreadsheets to their limits," she said. "So, I formed a Center of Excellence with representatives from different service lines to work out what we wanted to achieve."

And what RSM wanted to achieve in the UK was to become what Alteryx calls a digitally enabled modern business where "data is the fuel, accessible analytics are the engine, automation is the turbo boost, and human intelligence is the driver."

Across the world, RSM has already seen its data-enabled team mitigating risks and reaping the rewards with, for example, the ability to see what might be on the horizon. "Being more informed about outlook, particularly today, where it seems things are more volatile — interest rates, prices, and the geopolitical environment — is even more important for the office of finance to be able to support the business," Herring said. "If you're using a workflow approach like Alteryx you have much more flexibility and you're able — in a shorter period of time — to present a range of potential outcomes and use these data-driven insights to deliver decision intelligence."

Belsham said another achievement of data analytics is the removal of the possibility of human error. "The risk of manual processes is enormous — errors in calculations or multiple versions of a spreadsheet being passed around by email," she said. "With the way Alteryx functions, with the embedded auditing, it's almost self-governing."

The impact of digital transformation

This data revolution has allowed companies like RSM to use resources more wisely. "There's a huge war for talent, so the traditional supply of trained people is becoming much more competitive," Herring said. "But of course, the market is always looking for us to expand our capabilities." Technology offers a way to be able to reconcile those challenges and allow you to do more with less.

"Attracting — and retaining — talented staff at RSM has been given a huge boost by digital transformation and adopting a data analytics strategy," Herring said. "The human impact is actually bigger," he added. "When the engine's running well, and you've got people clamoring to join the organization and feeling fulfilled and engaged in their work, that shows through in meaningful impact for our clients."

The democratization of data helps enormously with this: Using tools that are no-code/low code allows data to be harnessed throughout the finance office, and not just by technology experts, empowering staff to find their own solutions and innovations.

"This is absolutely transformational because it means that we can remove a reliance on a central IT team," Belsham said. "The fact that we can put these tools in the hands of people who know their own business is really, really powerful."

The art of the possible

Both Belsham and Herring give the impression that RSM's digital journey is far from complete; the creative spark has been ignited and they are actively exploring trends such as generative AI and machine learning.

"We have a digital community that we launched earlier this year. The first project is an AI-capability evaluation, because we want to give a bit of licence to people across the firm to see what the art of the possible might be in their work in a controlled way, so that we can define our own guidelines for using large language models and natural language processing in a safe way," Belsham said.

RSM is also looking at how it can use technology such as Alteryx to further enhance its analytics community. Those traditional roles within the office of finance who, perhaps, didn't communicate as much before, now have the tools to collaborate and drive innovation. It's the human impact again.

"The best approach is to give people an opportunity to play around with the tools because they will naturally find out what it can do," Herring said. "Then they immediately apply that to points of frustration to solve problems that they have identified in their day-to-day work."

Find out more about how the award-winning Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform can help your business make intelligent decisions across the organization with automated, AI-driven insights.

This post was created by Insider Studios with Alteryx.