In the teenage coming of age movie, Napoleon Dynamite, the main character spends his time inventing and drawing hybrid mythical creatures like ligers (half lion, half tiger bred for their special magic powers). Napoleon’s ligers come to mind today when discussing the emerging role (already in place at Salesforce, Qualcomm, Sony, and Claire’s) of the COFO, a hybrid C-suite role combining operations and finance expertise, designed to directly impact operations and growth.
Transforming the Traditional CFO Role
Call it the next phase of the CFO evolution, the COFO combines strategic, operational, and leadership know-how to transform how businesses operate, innovate, and grow. For example, Salesforce’s COFO, Robin Washington, will be helping Salesforce accelerate use of Agentforce, a first of its kind digital labor platform with AI agents that help employees do their work.
Operational mastery, financial expertise, and strategic vision are all must-haves for COFOs like Washington. They exemplify the shift from traditional CFOs, concerned with compliance and financial reporting, to change makers, leading large-scale transformation projects with the potential to upend how organizations operate.
Background in Ops Is The Best Preparation for CFO Role
In an interview with CFO.com, Tony Ciotti, CFO, Riveron, discussed how his background in operations helped prepare him for the CFO role and how COFOs make perfect sense at this inflection point in business:
“My experience in operations has set me up for success, as much as my experience in finance has. In my mind, it’s all about having the ability to span across different functions in an organization while maintaining a strong financial perspective. And as part of the operations team, I’ve led resource management functions, recruiting functions, marketing, sales, IT functions. It makes me more than just the numbers guy who’s prescribing something to you.”
Qualcomm’s COFO, Akash Palkhiwala, also goes beyond the traditional role of being just a “numbers guy.” His purview extends to finance as well as oversight for the global go-to-market organization, operations, and IT. As with Salesforce’s COFO, Palkhiwala’s role is designed to help Qualcomm keep pace with competitors like Intel and NVIDIA as the chip industry leverages AI to accelerate growth.
Ops Know-How to Seize AI Opportunities
Seizing on the opportunities of AI necessitates a different approach to both finance and operations. COFOs may make their organizations more nimble, more adaptable, and more responsive to trends and innovations. The rise of this role underscores the expanding skill sets accounting and finance professionals need to stay relevant in the digital age. IMA’s new competency framework supports the development of skills in business acumen and operations as well as emerging tech, data and analytics, and digital transformation. The framework provides a blueprint for how practitioners can prepare themselves to lead large-scale transformation projects critical to business competitiveness.
Though COFOs are real people, not mythical creatures, they are endowed with special powers that come from the blend of their experience, their knowledge, and their skill sets. As organizations embrace experimentation, novelty, and innovation, it is likely we will see more roles converge and change to enable ambitious goals and technology transformations.