Everyone needs to read Scott Belsky’s 2022 forecast.

There are thousands of prediction posts every new year, but Scott Belsky’s annual forecast is a true bellwether. One of his forecasts is that every function of the enterprise will become a multi-player and fully immersive experience. He highlights Finance use cases. 

Here is Scott’s prediction and link to all 10 forecasts below: 

“I am particularly excited by companies that are reimagining every function of a company — from product and HR to financial planning and procurement — with collaboration, transparency, and more accessible interfaces at the core. The days of siloed departments and the bulky interlock processes required to work across departments are numbered. In recent months, I have seen a Dev Ops environment that resembles a game, a virtual water-cooler that drives “spontaneity as a service,” and a financial planning tool that essentially replaces that function with a tool that any departmental manager can use. Each of these tools allows anyone in the company to jump in, participate at varying levels of permission, and become a stakeholder in something they would otherwise never fully understand.

Less discussed are the costs and trade-offs of multi-player systems — whether it is an app that becomes less performant as it becomes more collaborative, or a consensus-driven protocol on the blockchain that becomes less performant as it becomes more consensus driven (just another form of collaboration). There is a generational shift in values and trade-offs: people would rather work together with greater latency than work faster alone.

The first stage of these products will be multi-player two-dimensional experiences. But I think we’ll quickly see them take on a third dimension. Imagine “walking through” your P&L and balance sheets, seeing the growth rate visualized, being able to “jump into” any particular customer or expense and feeling the runnings of your business in a fully immersive way. Imagine being able to walk over to a neutral zone in your immersive financial experience where you see professionals from other companies and can ask questions and share comparisons. These experiences will help more people understand these functions much like skeuomorphic design helped early users of the iPhone grasp the functionalities. The next generation of enterprise technology will be design-driven and will aim to “teach everyone how to fish” rather than divide the enterprise into interdependent silos.”

I couldn’t agree more. The days of finance building plans and analyzing actuals in walled gardens are ending. Finance will become a multi-player with tools built for business partner collaboration – allowing Finance to participate in day-to-day financial decision-making and create more accurate and real-time plans.