Over 80 percent of the survey's 516 respondents felt this way; which translates into an urgent mandate for finance functions to seek to improve their influence over strategic decision making at board level.
This survey was last run three years ago, when there was a groundswell of opinion even then that finance functions should be more forward looking, providing insight and advice which would lead to more informed decision making at board level. However this new survey's findings makes you wonder whether this ever happened at all and only the magnitude of the credit crisis has finally shaken people into action.
However, for those businesses now prepared to overhaul their finance function, the survey results offer encouragement. Of those businesses surveyed which had reorganised their finance function in the last three years, 60 percent claimed it had improved the overall performance of their finance staff and 55 percent felt it had improved the ability of their staff to focus on value-adding business support.
Lack of talent was cited as the single biggest barrier to change within the finance function (55 percent of respondents) and explains why the overwhelming response was to deliver required skills via training as opposed to via recruitment (90 percent of respondents).
The need for change is more pressing now than ever before and whilst at such a delicate time wholesale change may not be advisable, there is still much that can be done within finance now that can bolster a companies defences against what remains of the crisis. Today's finance function should be forward looking and focus on providing insightful enterprise-wide information. There is little or no sense in waiting for the crisis to end for this to happen.
