The role of the CFO is changing fast.  Customers, the board, your finance team, your stakeholders within the firm, and—most of all—technology is driving this change.  Of course, change is rarely easy, even if it’s entirely worthwhile. In this case, technology is both the source of your challenge and the solution you need.

Today, it takes a tech-savvy CFO—someone who understands and embraces the promise and power of technology—to navigate this exciting but sometimes uncertain future. A tech-savvy CFO seeks to modernize and transform the company’s business systems (and IT infrastructure) to boost staff productivity and give the company flexibility for the future. Even if you are in the process of becoming tech savvy, in today’s landscape, an effective CFO must have knowledge of how technology will positively impact your company.

Here are five ways the tech-savvy CFO uses technology to get ahead and stay ahead.

Transform your technology with Leaf Software Solutions
Tech-savvy CFOs know and understand the power of harnessing technology to quickly grow their business. They also know that the details of implementing a transformative solution are best left to the experts. Leaf Software Solutions combines more than 30 years of software application development with the latest technology to create a custom solution that can accelerate your company’s growth.


You can’t afford to be left behind. Contact us today to start your journey to becoming the tech-savvy CFO your company’s future demands.
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Leaf Software Solutions was recently named as one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana. This thirteenth annual program was created by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and Best Companies Group.  The recognition in 2018 is the seventh consecutive year in which Leaf has been named a Best Places to Work.
 
Established in 1987, Leaf delivers mission critical business solutions to financial institutions, insurance, logistics, manufacturing, and related vertical markets.  With 45 employees based in Indiana, Leaf has a track record of providing solutions that allow their customers to rapidly scale their businesses and remain competitive in their respective markets.

Dynamics 365 brings together the best of Microsoft’s CRM and ERP cloud offerings into one cloud service with specific, purpose-built apps for business functions. Sale, Marketing + Adobe, Finance, Project Service Automation, Customer Service, Operations, Field Service along with PowerApps, Power BI and Flow into one unified platform.

The apps are designed so they can be easily and independently deployed, which means you can start with the business area you need and scale as the business demands. All Dynamics 365 apps, plus the larger portfolio of cloud solutions like Office 365, will share a common data model so it will be a breeze to adopt additional capabilities.

​Leaf empowers organizations to leverage technology to create efficiencies and become more profitable. By combining your business logic, processes, and people with Dynamics 365 we are able to build custom end to end enterprise business software that manages any of the relationships that are critical to the success of your business.

Dynamics 365 End Users benefit?
First off, it is a gorgeous application that has a modern but familiar feel that your employees love

• Start with what you need. Dynamics 365 business apps fit specific roles so you can start with what you need and grow at your own pace. Traditionally you’d have to purchase the entire ERP or CRM together but with this decoupled approach, you can start where you want, and pay only for what you need. For example, you can get finance and then supply chain operations or customer service.
• Productivity where you need it. By connecting the structured workflow of business applications and processes with the unstructured work of collaboration and productivity, employees will be empowered with a merged world that reduces task/screen switching. The common data model makes it easier to surface context across Office 365, Dynamics 365, Power BI and more.
• Gain insights from built-in intelligence. Everyone wants dashboards and dreams of predictive and prescriptive analytics. By infusing business applications and processes with big data, advanced analytics, and IoT out-of-the-box, the tools can proactively guide employees and customers to optimal decision making and outcomes. With the power of the cloud and machine learning, you can connect what matters and transform insights into action.
• Be ready for growth. Organizations can reimagine their business models with a consistent, flexible, and extensible platform. These nimble applications will let them compose, modify and extend processes in real-time. You can deploy true unified commerce at a global scale and continue to grow and evolve the business software for a lifetime — all without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility of other solutions.

Once we retrieve the email, in addition to storing the body of the email, we’ll also want the subject, from, to and other relevant information for the email.  We’ll create an html document with HtmlAgilityPack to hold all this info.

​We’ll start with a skeleton html document structure loaded from an html string as this is far easier than creating each node of the html document by hand.

Last month Leaf’s Cloud Services team headed up to Chicago for the AWS Summit. Amazon Web Services holds these free summits in many cities around the world. They are a great opportunity for beginners and experienced users alike to network and learn more about the platform. They even provide the chance to take certification exams (which reminded us that we need to keep our Solutions Architect certifications up to date!).

This year it was clear that microservices are taking over. The longest lines were for sessions detailing how to run microservices on Docker or on how to implement them with Serverless techniques using AWS Lambda. The concept of breaking larger applications into smaller services is not new, but with the public descriptions of Service Oriented Architectures like those of AWS and Netflix, it is widely used. We're particularly interested in the organizational benefits of assigning small teams to building and supporting tightly-scoped, loosely coupled services.

An event like this is also a good opportunity to check in with services that have existed for a long time to stay current on new features.  A good example of these are AWS Storage Gateway and Elastic Filesystem which have both seen further development since their initial launch.  A service that impressed us thoroughly is Aurora: Amazon's enterprise-grade MySQL-compatible database engine. It shows how effectively AWS can squeeze out performance and reliability improvements when they are in control of the whole infrastructure stack. Several of our clients use Aurora, and it is good to see that this will pay dividends as we inherit regular improvements from Amazon's continued development.

​Another thing that struck us was the theme of Adrian Cockcroft’s keynote: public cloud providers have moved beyond allowing you to do the same things you did in your datacenter and are now providing capabilities that would be nearly impossible without massive investments in capital and talent. Take this example: CSPAN is annotating all of its video coverage of US politics by sampling frames and running them through Amazon Rekognition to detect the faces of politicians.

​On Tuesday (6/20/2017), the Leaf team gathered for a round of lightning talks given by Leaf employees. The format was as follows: Speakers had 5 minutes to present on whatever they wanted. No slide deck required.

Optimizing Unit Test Fixtures
Frederick Myers shared some of the tips that his team uses for optimizing unit tests fixtures for speed, navigation, and consistency.

It was great for everyone to get together for fun as well as an opportunity to share and learn (and have some pizza).

Answering the question "Does this make us better?" is fundamental at Leaf and why we subscribe to following the principles of the agile manifesto rather than adopting a single agile framework and apply it across the board. 

• Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Processes and tools should be there to serve a team, not the other way around. Tools are a support mechanism to facilitate organization and communication but at the end of the day, the relationships and skill of the of the people involved is what will generate success.
• Value working software over comprehensive documentation. We believe that iteratively building software with frequent feedback loops will deliver software that meets the customer's needs more efficiently and with a better results.  Developers should have the flexibility to experiment with new concepts. Stakeholders should have the ability to evolve their requirements through interaction with the software to help clarify their vision.
• Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  Ongoing collaboration between the development team and the customer supporting the iterative development of software and ensure development happens transparently and without surprises.
• Value responding to change over following a plan. We need to be nimble to respond to shifting needs – be it technical, customer, or market driven.