Last week, The Hackett Group released a report aptlytitled “Transformingthe Finance Organization: Ambition vs. Reality.” It combinesthe results of two Hackett research projects and reaches theconclusion that finance teams have been biting off more than theycan chew when it comes to transformational projects. However,Hackett also finds that finance executives' change agenda in 2013was considerably more modest than it was a couple yearsprior—suggesting that ambition in the finance function may bestarting to align more closely with reality.

In its 2013 “Key Issues Study,” Hackett asked finance executivesin a wide range of companies whether their organization has globalstandards in eight areas: technology infrastructure, keyperformance indicators (KPIs) and reporting, talent management,master data, centers of excellence/transaction processing centers,setting policies and strategies, designing and building processes,and operations/process execution. See Figure 1, below.

In each of these areas, respondents were asked to pick thecategory of global standardization that best describes theirorganization's current state and the category that they expect toreach in the next two to three years. Many respondents selected onecategory to describe their company's current state (e.g.,“predominantly global—51% to 80%”) and picked the next category upto describe where they expect to be in a few years (e.g., “maximumglobal level achievable—more than 80%”). The category with the mostrespondents reporting that their organization already has globalstandards was “policy/strategy standards”—19 percent said they'reat the maximum level achievable, and 16 percent said they'repredominantly global. These numbers are strong, yet 30 percent ofrespondents expect to reach the maximum level within three years,while 16 percent expect to be predominantly global at that time. Ifthese projects are successful, the proportion of companies at themaximum achievable level of globalization in policy/strategystandards would increase by more than 50 percent in just a fewyears.