We all have major events that are unmissable in our professions. In our case, we were delighted to participate in a go-to annual event: the FORUM DIMO which was held at the Congress Centre in Lyon on 5 April 2016. It's a chance to discuss and share experience on good management practices and organisation in business, and to participate in conferences and themed workshops. The discussion this year, more than ever, was centred around the "digital company".

What is a digital company?

According to CIGREF, it is a necessity for a company to succeed (it believes that by 2020, to be successful, a company must be digital, or...). Digital means agile and innovative in its internal organisation, in the management of its resources and its business model.

Digital also means communicating. One of the major challenges of digital is information: it must be accessible, qualitative and traceable.

In a digital model, information must be shared and valued. It is also a key to continuous improvement of processes. Around this reality, roles change, the organisation becomes horizontal and positions of responsibility, which once were at the top of the pyramid, are transformed. Managers become guides and facilitators who distribute information rather than gathering it in a collaborative way.

Another ongoing change is that divisions within services are moved around or eliminated entirely. Business managers are taking the lead in the changes that affect them to adapt with agility, without being restricted to their own little worlds. Naturally, they communicate with other professions, but it's the specialists and operational staff concerned who are the actors in changes of method. Thus, adherence to change, functional coherence and even the atmosphere within the company is ensured. A 100% winning deal!

This digital transition of company management and organisation strengthens the position of a particular profession: the CFO and the role of the CFO. Before, they were the guarantors of proper accounting and financial management (not an exhaustive definition!), but now they must ensure the traceability of the information that enables them to charge for products and services, and optimise processes at the same time. Therefore, they have a major role to play in choosing a digital management system.

But who are these CFOs, these key people in the success of the companies of tomorrow?

We have our own idea of who they are and what they do... But in order not to restrict ourselves to preconceptions, we went to meet several of your CFO colleagues, to collect their opinions on the digital company.

Thanks to this initiative, we will be sharing with you their different opinions and the challenges they face with regard to digital transformation. We will be revealing their testimonies to you in a few weeks, but before that, we would like to tell you a story...

We invite you to discover a short fictional series, in the form of an ebook, on digital transformation, as seen by Daniel, CFO at ARCHI&SOFT, software publishers for architectural practices.

His story will certainly bring back a few memories or inspire you with some strategies...