In this episode of CFO Weekly, Jim Benson, Chief Financial Officer at Dynatrace, joins Megan Weis to discuss key modernization strategies in the finance function, developing succession strategies, and what CFOs should focus on as we enter 2025.
Jim brings over three decades of leadership experience in market-leading technology companies. Before joining Dynatrace, he served as Executive Vice President and CFO at Akamai Technologies and spent over 20 years in various leadership roles at Hewlett Packard.
Transcript
Megan - 00:00:22: Today, my guest is Jim Benson, Chief Financial Officer for Dynatrace. Jim is a senior executive with over 30 years of experience in market-leading technology companies. He has built and scaled global finance organizations, implemented major strategic programs, and improved business performance. At Dynatrace, Jim oversees all aspects of finance, including accounting, risk and compliance, tax, treasury, investor relations, and corporate development, along with real estate and IT. Prior to joining Dynatrace, Jim served as Executive Vice President and CFO at Akamai Technologies, a global cloud services and cybersecurity leader. Jim has an MBA from Clark University and a BS in finance from Bentley College. Jim, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.
Jim - 00:01:44: Thank you for having me.
Megan - 00:01:45: Today, we're going to be talking about modernizing the finance function and what's important to CFOs as we enter 2025. And I'm excited about this opportunity to learn about you and your thoughts and experiences with this topic. So let's jump right in.
Jim - 00:01:59: Sounds good.
Megan - 00:02:00: First, if you could kind of just walk us through your career today, just so that we have some idea of what you've done and where you've been.
Jim - 00:02:08: Sure. So I feel like a dinosaur now. It's been, I've had a career here spanning over 30 years in a lot of different roles. I worked for some very large companies. So I had a 20-plus-year career spanning many different roles at Hewlett-Packard through many different areas, controllership roles, business finance partner roles, and internal audit roles. So a pretty extensive set of experiences. That you can get from a large company, which really did shape my career. I then left Hewlett-Packard and went to Akamai Technologies initially as the senior vice president of finance, or kind of called CFO in waiting, so to speak. I was there about two years as a senior vice president of finance and then became the CFO there and was the CFO for nine years. I went into a little bit of a retirement of two years when I left Akamai, and then I got lured back to Dynatrace, a fantastic company that kind of had a similar journey as what I was doing at Akamai, and I kind of wanted to do it again. So I have been the CFO at Dynatrace now for going on two years. So it's been a fun ride through a lot of different experiences that I'm sure we'll be able to get into.
Megan - 00:03:24: And looking back on your career, what key experiences or moments shaped your leadership approach to finance and operations?
Jim - 00:03:31: Sometimes you're blessed. I'd say I was blessed very early in my career, and I probably didn't know it at the time. When I was graduating from college. I knew I wanted a career in finance, but I really didn't quite know exactly what that meant. I knew I didn't want to be an accountant. And so I was looking at financial management programs that would give me some diversity and really help shape what I wanted to do. So that's how I started my career. I started my career in a financial management program at Digital Equipment, and I didn't realize it at the time. Looking back on it, it was probably the best decision I ever made that I was able to get a company that was very much a thought leader in finance for the time. That was 30 years ago. And I would say the CFO and the finance function in many companies were still very much a back office function, kind of accounting controls. And so certainly that is a key attribute of any financial role. But one of the things that digital did very well in the early days was this notion of a finance business partner. And that was something that certainly is very common now but back then was not very common. You maybe had companies like General Electric that had such programs. So I was very fortunate early in my career to have finance business partner roles where you were forced into learning, not just the financial elements, but also learning the business elements of operations. I'd say secondly, I was very fortunate to have mentors in my career early. And when I say mentors, I don't necessarily mean my financial mentors, not necessarily the people in the chain of command that were my finance managers or bosses. It was general managers or functional leaders that I supported that I just developed very close bonding with. And so I brought an orientation of operations from working with leaders that kind of shaped how I think about different things. So I was very fortunate early on to learn it's important to understand business drivers. It's important to understand the value chain of how I call them equations. What's the revenue equation that makes a company work? Revenue is an output. You need to understand the inputs. The same thing with cost of goods sold or operating expenses. And so think of it as a DuPont model approach, but applied to different financials. And so I learned that early in my career. And I learned that really good finance leaders and ultimately CFOs really need to have good operating understandings and good business understandings. And I was fortunate to see such roles earlier in my career.
Megan - 00:06:11: And having done that rotational program, I'm just curious, is that something that you guys have implemented at Dynatrace where you rotate people through different areas of the business?
Jim - 00:06:22: It's a great question, Megan. I would say that, so not yet. I'll use the phrase not yet. While at Akamai, I did implement something like that at Akamai. So Akamai did. After I was there a couple of years, we did implement an Akamai financial development program. The challenges you have when you're a, I'll call it a mid-sized company like an Akamai or a mid-sized company like a Dynatrace, are harder to put such programs in place because you're looking for a talent pool that is consistent. That was easier to do with Digital Equipment, easier to do with a Hewlett-Packard because they were very large companies. And so you had the economies of scale to be able to have very established, dedicated programs. We bootstrapped something when I was at Akamai where we actually had people, interestingly enough, that came from such programs. And so we bootstrapped something that I would say fit the size and scale of the company. And it worked very well, interestingly enough, that I know that many of the leaders that today sit in different financial leadership roles at Akamai came from such a program. And in some cases, we had leaders that went through the program and literally have gone into sales roles and gone into sales operations roles. And so I have not yet put it in place at Dynatrace. I'd say it's a matter of probably when, not if. I think we have to figure out when the timing is for when we need to have the, I'd say, the capacity to be able to have a program that is more than one year in duration. You have to be able to be committed to such a program because you don't want a program to be a start-stop like that.
Megan - 00:07:58: Yeah, that makes sense. And as we look ahead, as we start 2025 and into the next couple of years, how is it that you envision the role of CFO evolving in response to all the rapid technological advancements that we're seeing, the changing business models, and the increasing demands for transparency?
Jim - 00:08:17: I'd say one of the big things that any good CFO needs to do is to stay current. And one of the ways I stay current is that I am a voracious reader. So there's a lot of different things that I stay engaged with from a reading perspective. I also think it's important to stay current with different external constituencies. In my case, I have access to, say, investment bankers. I have access to consulting firms, whether it be McKinsey, people in my network, or Accenture, where you're having an ongoing engagement, not necessarily a paid engagement, by the way. This is just you having an on. Sometimes it becomes paid, but you're staying current on what's going on in the different fields. And so I think people do that in different ways. Some people kind of read good books. Some people are kind of, they stay current in their own way. I do it from one, I'm a voracious reader, to I make sure that I stay engaged with outside constituencies, not just people within the company, in order to bounce ideas off of. In our case, I'd say that the top priority for our company, and it's going to vary by company and based on what is important and strategic for that company. In the case of Dynatrace, what's important for us is growth. We operate in a very large market that is rapidly growing. We are in the early innings, using a baseball analogy, of being able to capitalize on that. A big priority for me and for the company is growth. And that is, what is it going to take to be able to accelerate growth in the company? I'd say another priority area that any CFO should be focused on is people and the development of people. That's very important in any company. Midsize companies, that becomes a challenge at times because what ends up happening in many cases is you hire for the skill need of a role and don't necessarily hire beyond that. And so it's important that you continue to develop people, give people different experiences, and give people different rotations. And so I'd say people development needs to be a continued kind of focus area for any finance leader. And then I'd say maybe germane again to Dynatrace is alignment. And what I mean by that is I do view the CFO role very much as driving alignment end-to-end across the company. There are obviously things that need to happen from a sales perspective, marketing products. I do believe it is the CFO's role to expand and stitch all of this together to make sure that there is a kind of a blueprint, a blueprint for success, and that there's alignment and there's funding and there's cascading. All too often what happens is you have siloed organizations that are, I would say, connected at a very loose level. It's very important to drive alignment at a very integrated level and that you have leading indicators that help with that. So those are a few things that I'd say that I'm particularly focused on.
Megan - 00:11:19: And before we go any further, talk to us a minute about Dynatrace. What is it that they do, and what was it that excited you enough to come out of retirement?
Jim - 00:11:29: So at the highest level, Dynatrace is in a category called observability. Not very many people have heard of that category. Think of it as a company that monitors applications in different technology workloads. So they monitor them. They find out where there potentially are issues with buggy code or some issue with a server somewhere. So they identify bottlenecks and problems with software and in workloads. And they help identify how you remediate them. And so at the highest level, that's what the company does. It has software. It has this very broad platform that allows using this software to identify specifically where issues are with different IT workloads. And as you can imagine, with more and more workloads moving into these very broad, complex, hyper-cloud environments, you have diversity across public workloads and private workloads. Finding issues and diagnosing where those issues are and how you remediate them is a growing problem. And so this category of observability used to be perceived as kind of somewhat optional. I'd say it is no longer optional. It is mandatory is kind of the phrase that we use. And so we are one of two of the largest public companies that specialize in this space. There are others in the company. Many of them are gone private. And so the company has been public now for about five years. We just celebrated our five-year anniversary in July. And we're one of two of the fastest-growing public companies in this particular space.
Megan - 00:13:05: That's awesome. Congratulations on that.
Jim - 00:13:07: No, thank you.
Megan - 00:13:08: And with your extensive experience leading financial transformations, what do you think are the key components for modernizing the finance function? And how can CFOs leverage new technologies to drive efficiency and enhance decision making?
Jim - 00:13:23: One of the things I have found when you're driving a financial transformation is, and as you modernize the finance function, and we're dealing with this a little bit at Dynatrace, is that you don't start with technology as the first thing. What you have to start with is the business process. Because more often than not, the problem isn't technology. Technology is an enabler to addressing it. But focus on the business process, focus on simplifying whatever the business process is, and focus on standardizing a more simplified approach to dealing with that, and then you can look at automation. And we're dealing with that right now within Dynatrace that when I joined the company, we were a very regionally centric, I'll call it, accounting function. So we have four regions: North America, kind of our EMEA region, Asia-Pac, and LATAM. And we have a controllership model that exists for the four regions and is actually embedded in many countries. And so we have a lot of common activities that today are being done in different ways across different countries. So we have had a need to focus on the process; focus on how do you simplify the kind of the order-to-cash process? How do you simplify the procure-to-pay process? How do you simplify a kind of your cash collections process? And so we've been focusing on how do we develop global standards? And once you develop global standards, then you can build a level of automation. You mentioned GenAI, or I think one of the new technologies. I'd say we are staying very close to that. We are not today users of GenAI within our financial operations. However, I do want to become a fast follower. I don't want to be on the bleeding edge of someone implementing a GenAI initiative. We're just not big enough as a company to justify that. We want to learn from others and see what has worked and then see where we can apply it. But when I think of going back and I netted out for financial transformations and modernization, I start with the process and then align technology thereafter.
Megan - 00:15:41: And with the roles within finance and accounting becoming increasingly strategic and operational, what specific qualities or skill sets are you looking for when you hire for your own team?
Jim - 00:15:52: It varies by role, but one of the things I always look for when I'm hiring people, and as a matter of fact, I went through it with Dynatrace, is that I actually had to hire several of my staff from my leadership team. When I joined, I had to hire a new kind of business finance FP&A leader. I had to hire a new chief accounting officer. And so one of the things that I do look for when I'm interviewing people is I want someone that has seen the movie. And so think of it; what I mean by that is I'm looking for someone that can do more than the job I'm hiring them for. I'm looking for someone that can expand beyond that. And so it's one thing to be looking at a chief accounting officer that has all of the requisite accounting skills that you would expect. But I'm also looking for someone that maybe could expand beyond that. That potentially is someone that could be a potential successor. The same is true for kind of FP&A and business finance: someone that has the capacity to do more than the role that they're in. That is not to suggest that I only hire people that have that skill set, because, as an example, I ended up hiring from the outside for my chief accounting officer role. And that individual was someone that I thought could extend all of the, what was needed within that remit of a chief accounting officer. And so that person had been in a role in a similar company. So he had the prior experiences, and he had some of the intangibles that I found to be important: he had a strong interest beyond accounting, and he had a strong interest in understanding and leveraging the business, which is important for the finance function. As it pertains to the FP&A role that I filled, or I'll call it my business finance, data analytics, and data science function, I hired someone from within the company. I had a very high-performing, high-potential leader that maybe didn't check all the boxes relative to been there, done that, seen something at scale, but brought the requisite skill set, brought the requisite kind of passion, brought the requisite hunger for continuous improvement, and changing things, and brought an automation orientation. So I kind of had someone that was a very talented leader that was worthy of giving a chance. And so two years into this role, one year for both of these roles that I just hired, one was someone that grew the job. And then the phrase I use is someone that had to grow into the job. And sometimes you have the luxury of being able to have people grow into the job. And in that case, that person that grew into the job, I had a skill set that was strong in that particular area to be able to help coach and mentor that particular individual. So it varies by role, but those are some attributes that I do look for.
Megan - 00:18:45: And talk to us about how you're using data at Dynatrace and how CFOs can ensure that they're making the most of their data and move from just reporting the data to truly using it to be a storyteller.
Jim - 00:18:58: I'd say there's two attributes. So one is I'll separate the data and using data from the storytelling a little bit. And the accessing data, what's really important is that you have a robust way of accessing data, that data has consistency, and that you've curated the data in a way that you can have access to it. The definitions are clear. And then you're in a position to be able to leverage technology to be able to do a lot of analytics around that. And so it's really important that you make sure that your data set is clean. Now you're leveraging tools that can help you with that. And so interestingly enough, we've kind of gone through that within Dynatrace, within our FP&A function, where that was a particular strength that this leader brought that I mentioned earlier. And so we have very good access to data, and we're able to spend less time, I would say, accessing the data. Because a lot of times in finance functions, you're spending a lot of time just assembling the data, not enough time analyzing the data. The good news is some of the things that we've been able to do, like the accessing the data activity and being able to spend less time doing that and more time analyzing it, have been something I think we've been able to put in place over the last 18 months. But then there's, okay, now you have access to the data. What are the different ways you want to do analytics? And that gets back to your storytelling question, which is, frankly, an overlooked area for finance leaders, which is the art of storytelling. Many times finance professionals. Do all sorts of analysis, and they don't necessarily net it out for either the business consumer or whatever your audience might be. Very, very important to be able to distill down data into kind of so what's and that you're doing analytics to give you the so what so you can actually take action. So you're developing analytics to drive insight, insight to so what, so what to action. It's not something you learn overnight, but it's something that you need to kind of coach and counsel your teams to be able to do that. And frankly, we try to do that in Dynatrace. Some of it is you do it by putting people in a position where they're presenting and then you're giving them feedback thereafter around areas that they can improve on.
Megan - 00:21:20: And the CFO, we've talked about this a bit, but they're increasingly seen as a business partner and the key driver of growth and not just the financial steward that they were maybe 10 to 20 years ago. So how do you think the traditional boundaries of financial leadership are? Shifting, and what steps can CFOs take to become more integrated into the overall business?
Jim - 00:21:42: The good news is I think the finance profession, or the CFO profession, has already been migrating this way a bit anyways, where in many cases, CFOs are looked to be also, even if they don't have the title per se; they're looked to be the CEO. They're looked to be the integrator beyond just the financial elements of the role. What that requires is you have to get engaged. You have to be very engaged with the different functional leaders. At Dynatrace, we don't have business units or divisions. We are a functionally oriented model. So it requires me, and it requires key members on my leadership team to be engaged with different functional leaders, whether it be the sales leader, whether it be the marketing leader, whether it be the product leader and the R&D leader, or whether it be the HR leader. It's important that you're engaged with them at an active level, not a passive level, not the person that is just orchestrating a process to build a budget or build a financial plan. Someone that is very actively engaged in, as I said earlier, what are the value chains of activities that need to occur across the different functions to drive whatever business outcome we have. So I'd say the CFO role is evolving to someone that... Is very involved in business strategy. And in order to do that, you need to stay current. In order to do that, even though you're not expected to necessarily be the thought leader around R&D, you need to have enough wherewithal of the industry that you're operating in, the competitive landscape, the product landscape, and the capabilities that exist. And so I'd say finance leaders and CFOs nowadays, your skills of financial skills and analytics, those are table stakes. What's the growing evolution? Is there a need to be much more embedded in what are the go-to-market models? What are the different go-to-market models that might work? So one of the things that I probably didn't talk about, but earlier in my career, I built a lot of breadth in my career around lots of different roles that supported sales organizations, roles that supported different business models. And so those sets of experiences have allowed me to bring to bear now that I am a CFO. Prior experiences where I've seen different go-to-market models. I've seen different go-to-market models for services organizations, software organizations, SaaS organizations, and consumption models. I've seen consumption models. I've seen SaaS models. And so some of it is you bring a level of breadth to different situations that allows you to hopefully learn from the past. And that doesn't mean I always did everything right, but I learned what did work and what didn't work. And someone that has that interest can apply that and help integrate for the company. That is where the CFO role is evolving.
Megan - 00:24:35: And while we're on the topic of collaboration and integration, how do you think that CFOs can partner with CEOs and CTOs or CIOs to ensure that financial strategies are aligned with technological innovation and long-term business goals?
Jim - 00:24:51: Going back to my point around the CFO role, it is evolving much more to a COO role. And it varies by company. I would say that for Dynatrace, we have a CEO in the company that I had a prior working relationship with at Akamai who became the CEO here. His expectation is that I am operating in a COO capacity. So his expectation is that I can work with the CTO, who happens to be the founder of the company. I can work with the CRO. And so some of it is building roadmaps, building blueprints. What is the blueprint for success? And obviously there's a financial element where you're doing a financial sizing of the blueprint, but there's also an operational element. And so this evolving relationship of the CFO's expectation of doing that requires a CFO that, again, as I said earlier, you have to be able to embed yourself in what drives the business model. You have to be able to outline; I use the phrase what you have to believe, which is what do you have to believe in order for this blueprint to be successful? And then ultimately, how do you embed that in a value chain of activities across the company? One of the things I think that's very important for companies is that you need to develop North Stars. And when I say North Stars, I mean, what is the journey you're trying to get to over the next several years? Because if you map out where you want to be in the next several years, it forces a discussion around what needs to change. Maybe the rate and pace of innovation need to be increased. And so you need to make more investments in R&D. Maybe you need to reshape your go-to-market model to drive more productivity. So some of the things that allow you to do that are setting North Stars, which are kind of multi-year goals, and then working back. And you're working back to identify, okay, if I want to get to that outcome three years from now, what needs to be put in place now? And so that is, I think, a key element that you can then debate as a leadership team. And then you can have debates around, where does M&A have to play a role? Because perhaps there's an area that you've outlined from a North Star perspective that requires you to be more ambitious around M&A or identifying areas that will help accelerate the rate and pace of an area. It could be an investment. It could be an acquisition. It could be an adjustment to your go-to-market model. It could be driving an efficiency to be able to self-fund investments to grow more. And so it varies, but that role is becoming increasingly important as a CFO.
Megan - 00:27:26: And let's switch gears for just a bit and talk about budgeting. But obviously, it's no small task these days, given the uncertainty in global markets and just all the uncertainty in general. So what do you consider to be the most critical factors when you're creating a budget or a forecast for the upcoming year or three years?
Jim - 00:27:46: I'll go back to my prior comment about it's not that budgeting is easy, so I'm not going to suggest to you that it is. However, if you do have a kind of multi-year roadmap, which is where do I want to be in the next three years, you kind of have a blueprint of what it's going to take. And to me, the budget, or I'll call it the annual plan, is effectively year one of that multi-year journey. And so you're developing at a much more discrete level of detail what is required to get there. But if you've done a good job thinking about a multi-year plan, where you want to be, and those are financial goals, those are operating goals, so some of them may have very clear initiatives that you want to drive to. I actually find the budgeting process becomes easier. However, having said that, there's always going to be a budgeting process where your appetite for investment is greater than your appetite for being able to afford that within the company. And so one of the things I think we do particularly well here at Dynatrace is we have a process that is effectively called our six-quarter planning process. And we build that after the second quarter of our current fiscal year. Where we're developing a roadmap of shaping activities called sizing envelopes for different functions and different initiatives. We identify areas that potentially are gaps. We then leverage that as part of the annual planning process to determine where. So the annual planning process then becomes an attribute to take those inputs and understand where do I want to prioritize more? Where do I want to disinvest to be able to fund more? And so it's always a challenging process. I think the CFO needs to orchestrate that. I think the, obviously, leader on your FP&A is a key element of that. And so I'd say for Dynatrace, I feel pretty good about where we're at, as I mentioned one of the things, I think it's important to be able to embed into that, is this notion of equations, which is I mentioned before. Revenue with an output, there is a bunch of activity, whether it be bookings, and if it's bookings, what do you need to drive for productivity in sales? What is your capacity model from a sales perspective? So the budgeting process, to me, is the building block of leading indicator attributes that allow you to achieve your financial objectives. And so a big part of our budgeting process is to make sure we're very well aligned. I'll give you a good example: if you want to make investments, say in R&D, and maybe you want to grow your headcount at a much faster rate and pace. Well, guess what? You need an HR function from a talent acquisition perspective that has the proper funding to be able to accelerate hiring. Sometimes I find in companies that the functions are not always aligned end to end. And so while you might have a desire to accelerate headcount, you haven't necessarily connected the dots that, well, you need to make sure you have a talent acquisition alignment to that. What is the staffing model? What is the recruiting model? And so the budgeting process teases a lot of this out. And no, you never do it perfectly. But it's important that you understand end to end this value chain of what is required to achieve your objectives.
Megan - 00:31:00: And last question, but as we enter 2025, what are the trends that are top of mind for you? And how are you preparing your team for the future?
Jim - 00:31:09: So I would say that to me, the big focus for our company is growth. So a lot of my time is spent on, and my team's, how do we drive more growth, which means we need to figure out where we drive efficiency elsewhere in the company to be able to reinvest for growth. So I'm spending a lot of my time there. I also think it's important that we continue to develop and expand our leadership capabilities. So I am spending time on ensuring there's succession planning within my organization and that this tends to be a challenge in midsize companies where you have single points of failure. And so it's important that you start thinking about succession, development, and rotation because, at the end of the day, having the people to deliver to your expectations is critically important. The CFO can only do so much individually. He needs a team of people to support that. So there's an element of development, and there's an element of succession planning. I would say also that there is an element from an external perspective of making sure you stay very current. I mentioned that earlier, current industry trends and areas that you think could accelerate a roadmap could be M&A or something else. And so those are just some areas that. I know. I spend a particularly large amount of time. One of the things you didn't hear me say is I don't spend a lot of time on accounting, and I don't think a CFO really should. I have a chief accounting officer that makes sure that works well. I'm spending my time on the operating activities to hopefully assemble a set of. Activities within the company to drive our business objectives. If we can hit our business objectives, ultimately that fuels us to be able to continue to make investments in critical areas.
Megan - 00:32:58: Jim, thank you so much for being my guest today. This has been a really interesting conversation.
Jim - 00:33:02: Oh, thank you for having me.
Megan - 00:33:04: Yeah, thanks for finding the time to be here with us today. And I wish you and Dynatrace all the best. And to our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The evolution of the CFO role from traditional financial steward to strategic business partner
- What are the critical components of modernizing finance functions
- How CFOs can leverage data analytics and storytelling to drive better decision-making
- CFO's expanding role in driving company-wide alignment and growth
Key Takeaways:
Growth, Alignment, and Staying Ahead
The modern CFO must be more than a numbers person; they need to be a strategist, connector, and leader. Staying ahead requires continuous learning, engaging with external experts, and driving alignment across the company. At Dynatrace, growth is the top priority, and a CFO plays a key role in accelerating it. However, beyond financials, investing in people development and ensuring seamless cross-functional alignment is essential.
"I do believe it is the CFO's role to make sure that there is a blueprint for success." Benson remarked. - 08:12 - 11:13
Process First, Tech Second
When modernizing the finance function, technology isn't the starting point; the process is. Jim highlights that financial transformations should begin with simplifying and standardizing business processes before layering in automation and new technologies. For hiring, Jim seeks leaders who can do more than their current role, those with the potential to expand, drive change, and bring a mindset of continuous improvement.
"Don't start with technology. Start with the business process." Benson said. - 13:20 - 18:57
The CFO Behind Key Modernization Strategies
The modern CFO is a key business strategist, deeply embedded in shaping the company's future. Today's CFOs must go beyond financial planning and become integrators across functions, collaborating closely with sales, marketing, product, and R&D. Success in this evolving role requires an understanding of business models, GTM strategies, and industry landscapes.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
