Finance driving new value propositions

Finance organizations are in an excellent position to help the business drive compelling, new value propositions into the market. Carolyn Nash knows this firsthand. Watch as she discusses Finance’s ability to model the end-to-end implications of transforming the business model. It’s a great story about turning insights into new value.

This is the third part of a conversation between Accenture’s Aneel Delawalla and Carolyn Nash of Red Hat. View Part 1 of the conversation here and Part 2 of the conversation here.

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Aneel Delawalla:  So what is Red Hat finance doing to engage with the business, to drive differentiated business models, unique customer value propositions, to have that market-facing impact?

Carolyn Nash:  When I think about how we need to prepare for that, we're moving ourselves from a predominantly subscription-based business, trying to get into more of a consumption-based billing and pricing.  It's really changing the model.  You think about that business model and what does that require?  What Red Hat has to differentiate on is their operational and their financial agility.  That relies on finance in a lot of ways to help make that successful.  We are not only taking and modeling out what this transformation looks like from a company level but we're also looking at what are the implications really end to end on what that means?  So we're relying very much on our finance leaders and our finance teams to help think through the implications of that.  What does that mean?  Everything from the operational components of how we meter, how we bill, how we record revenue, to what does it mean from the cost model?  What does it mean from a sales compensation perspective and how we resource things?  It's also going to rely on us to move very quickly, very agilely, through these things.  Make decisions based on the best information we have. We can't rely on perfection here.  We’ve got to go with the best.  So it's that agile, move fast, both from a financial but also as transactions and customers move through the value chain at Red Hat.  Finance has a seat at the table in all of those conversations because of how we weave in through the financials and through the operations of the company.