I qualified as a Chartered Accountant more than two decades ago, and naturally most of my professional career has been associated with finance.
Accounting. Reporting. Controls. Commercial finance. Supply chain. Budgeting. Profitability. Business partnering.
But somewhere along the way, I realised that I have never looked at myself purely as a finance person.
Mention “IT” to a Chartered Accountant and Income Tax may naturally come to mind.
For me, IT has almost always meant Information Technology.
Technology has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, not necessarily because I wanted to become a programmer, but because I have always been interested in understanding how things work and, more importantly, why they sometimes don't.
When something doesn't work the way I expect, my instinct is rarely to simply accept the limitation.
I want to understand it.
Why does the software behave this way?
Can the process be changed?
Is there another tool?
Can something be automated?
Is there a workaround?
And once I find the answer, I usually feel compelled to share it with somebody else.
That instinct probably explains why my personal website, parkhi.net, has had a section called Workarounds for years.
Technology was never really separate from my finance career
Looking back, the pattern is clearer than it seemed at the time.
Early in my career I became involved in migrating financial data from Tally to SAP during a post-merger integration.
At another point, although it had little to do with my formal finance responsibilities, I registered the organisation's domain and helped implement its official email system, eventually involving more than 250 email IDs. I even administered the domain, largely because I found the technology interesting.
Later came SAP certification, system implementations, process redesign, reporting architecture, automation, finance controls, procure-to-pay processes and ERP migrations.
None of this changed my professional qualification.
I remained a Chartered Accountant.
But technology increasingly became the way I approached business problems.
Technology is most valuable when it solves a real problem
Perhaps this is why I have never been particularly interested in technology merely because something is new.
A new application, an AI model or an ERP system is interesting.
But the more important questions for me are:
What problem does it solve?
Does it genuinely make the process better?
What happens when the real-world process doesn't fit the system?
Can we simplify the process before automating it?
Are we creating technology for users, or forcing users to work for the technology?
These questions become especially important in finance.
Finance sits at the intersection of almost every business process, procurement, sales, supply chain, taxation, inventory, cash flows, controls and management decision-making.
As organisations become more digital, finance professionals therefore need to understand considerably more than accounting.
They need to understand systems.
They need to understand data.
They need to understand processes.
And increasingly, they need to understand automation and artificial intelligence.
The most interesting problems sit between functions
Some of the most difficult organisational problems don't belong neatly to Finance, IT or Operations.
They sit somewhere in between.
Finance understands what needs to be controlled.
Operations understands what happens on the ground.
Technology understands what the system can do.
Transformation happens when somebody can connect all three.
That intersection increasingly fascinates me.
After more than two decades in finance, retail and supply-chain environments, I have started thinking more deliberately about something that has probably been present throughout my career:
I enjoy solving business problems through technology.
I enjoy investigating.
I enjoy questioning the existing process.
I enjoy finding better ways of doing things.
And I enjoy explaining what I have learnt so somebody else can benefit from it.
Perhaps that is why the word “workaround” has always appealed to me.
A workaround begins with a simple belief:
There must be another way.
And very often, there is.
