Can cfos keep doing it all?

CFOs are eager to develop their role as strategic business spouse to the CEO, but their hands are still tied by conformity and corporate governance duty. That's the pith of an Ernst & Young study of more than 250 C-suite and board level execs at $1 billion-plus companies about the world.

Respondents felt that finance chiefs divide their time jolly equally betwixt the four key roles of scorer (monitoring and coverage corporate consequence, compliance, and tax); observer (reporting to the board and investors); custodian (monitoring and improving controls and risk direction); and concern partner (participating in scheme, leading M&A, and portion to predict business public presentation). But when asked which activities CFOs should allocate their time to, 35 percentage selected the concern partner class. Only 17 percentage voted for the scorer activities; the observer and keeper roles scored 23 percent and 25 percentage, respectively.

What's more, a startling 50 percent of the North American respondents (31 percentage overall) said that the CFO lacks apprehension of the wider issues that the concern faces.

That last consequence was something of a surprise to Donna Dark Joseph Campbell, principal and Americas finance sphere practice leader in Ernst & Young's advisory services practice. "My experience is that CFOs do have a good grasp of the info; however, what they don't have is the ability to communicate their apprehension," she says. "They don't have sufficiency time to truly pull jointly the info in a way that it can be used for strategic decision-making because of conformity and regulatory issues, which are very burdensome.

"They seem still to be very much focused on responding to the regulators and the investors and their demands."

The resulting frustration may be contributing to CFO churn, Joseph Campbell thinks, as finance leaders go after other chance that offer more strategic prospects.

The study also notes a comparatively low level of collaboration between finance and some other key functions, notably R&D, HR, and marketing. While finance has strong contributions to make in these areas, that's not generally happening at the moment.

Part of the explanation, says Campbell, is that "much of that information is still being gathered and managed within the business units, versus being managed at a more overall corporate level. The business units feel they need to have someone within their own organization gathering the information.

"The ways that I'm seeing CFOs being able to get into R&D, marketing, and things like that are by streamlining reporting, streamlining their finance organization, and bringing more of the business unit specialists under the domain of the CFO so that the information then is provided at a more centralized area."

That may well be, but no doubt for many CFOs the idea of enhancing support for R&D, HR, and marketing raises one big question: How will they find the time?

Download Ernst & Young's "What's Next for the CFO? Where Ambition Meets Reality" here.