Last week, The Hackett Group released a report aptly titled “Transforming the Finance Organization: Ambition vs. Reality.” It combines the results of two Hackett research projects and reaches the conclusion that finance teams have been biting off more than they can chew when it comes to transformational projects. However, Hackett also finds that finance executives' change agenda in 2013 was considerably more modest than it was a couple years prior—suggesting that ambition in the finance function may be starting to align more closely with reality.

In its 2013 “Key Issues Study,” Hackett asked finance executives in a wide range of companies whether their organization has global standards in eight areas: technology infrastructure, key performance 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 the category of global standardization that best describes their organization's current state and the category that they expect to reach in the next two to three years. Many respondents selected one category to describe their company's current state (e.g., “predominantly global—51% to 80%”) and picked the next category up to describe where they expect to be in a few years (e.g., “maximum global level achievable—more than 80%”). The category with the most respondents reporting that their organization already has global standards was “policy/strategy standards”—19 percent said they're at the maximum level achievable, and 16 percent said they're predominantly global. These numbers are strong, yet 30 percent of respondents expect to reach the maximum level within three years, while 16 percent expect to be predominantly global at that time. If these projects are successful, the proportion of companies at the maximum achievable level of globalization in policy/strategy standards would increase by more than 50 percent in just a few years.