At the Hyperion site i cam across the IBM CFO study,

Finance's move toward enhancing flexibility and responsiveness is a Progressive one. The IBM 2005 Global CFO Study shows that Finance organizations that are highly effective can attribute their achievements to moving from a role of static reporting and data stewardship to a more predictive role of providing dynamic business insight to decision makers. Moreover, CFOs aspire to deliver insight simultaneously across the three top areas of importance for an enterprise - performance, growth and risk.

The attached chart shows Finance's Top Areas of Importance:



Excerpts from the study:
Highly effective Finance organizations in our study have enabled delivery of insight by addressing its inhibitors: structural complexity and fragmented information. These organizations are:

- Mitigating enterprisewide structural complexity by standardizing, simplifying and optimizing - Highly effective Finance organizations employ common, simplifi ed processes and data/information standards. They also reduce the number of ERP systems and rationalize fi nance budgeting/ forecasting tools to improve the integration of information and delivery of insight. Moreover, organizations with optimized delivery models are more likely to have standard policies, common/simplified processes, functional best practices and rationalized technology.

- Enabling fact-based decisions by integrating information enterprisewide - finance organizations that drive global process ownership and establish common information standards - which together help facilitate information integration - are more effective at delivering insights.

Using this foundation, these organizations are enhancing their ability to provide business insights by:

- Partnering with the enterprise to enhance growth insight
- Optimizing decision support to enhance performance insight
- Driving beyond compliance to enhance risk insight

Below is another chart, highlighting low enterprise wide adoption of technology or process improvements:



Prashanth Rai