Taking control of the wheel

To understand how to leverage the transformation challenge and position the organization toward new opportunities for controllership, controllership first should be defined through the baseline activities and capabilities that drive performance. At a level setting, effective controllership organization models are interconnected by data and address primary activities within close, consolidation, reporting, and financial analysis—these processes and interconnections define “controllership.”

In addition to the processes, the controllership function’s characteristics that have an impact on capabilities also define the function. Attributes such as the organization’s size, system landscape, industry and regulatory environment, and service structures affect everything—from access to meaningful data and the agility and scalability of operations to the possible competitive advantage with analytics and advanced data visualization. Leading controllership organizations have a deep understanding of how their characteristics may inhibit or catalyze enhanced performance capabilities across the organization.

This interpretation of controllership organizations against today’s shifting landscape highlights both challenges and opportunities that can impact controllership leaders, their teams, and the whole function. By observing the environment through a critical lens and gathering real-life perspectives from transformation experience, we have gathered some key considerations for establishing a leading controllership organization model and what these operating decisions can mean for the future of controllership.

Shared service centers
Evolving shared service center capabilities can enhance the controllership organization with considerable benefits, including increased efficiencies, process standardization, and consolidating tasks to free up time for more value-added activities. However, it can also affect resources, change-management requirements, and decisions around outsourcing and other delivery models.

Reporting-line decisions
Rationalizing reporting lines streamline and standardize reporting through a framework that removes unnecessary reports and data, consolidates reports with an integrated and automated solution, and harmonizes the reporting process to reduce cost and allow valuable resources more time to pursue more insightful work and optimal performance.

Global process owners (GPOs) and process improvement
Organizations that leverage GPOs are often better positioned to achieve centralized process governance and information models. The enterprise-wide model or process ownership helps create clear governance with more accountability, standardized processes, and centralized global operating models. However, process improvements at this scale and complexity can also lead to “boiling the ocean,” so assessing the benefits and broad implications for an end-to-end process that operates across functional and geographic silos is critical.

Global strategy
Today’s controllership leaders should consider the benefits and drawbacks across a spectrum of organization models that are aligned with the organization’s global strategy in a world where functional and geographic silos continue to break down.

After defining controllership by its characteristics and impact and positioning strategic decisions toward performance value in transformation, controllership can be further optimized with a new model, including initiatives and processes that focus on the future-forward changes dominating the landscape. The workforce of the future, the marketplace in a post-pandemic world, and new core principles driving organizations into unchartered territory should all be at the forefront of a leading model for the future. Think about the implications of these characteristics and what they mean for the future of controllership:

• The workforce of the future is driven by tech-savvy employees and hybrid work.
• Environmental, Social and Governance is a core principle driving performance through full integration.
• The post-pandemic environment has had an impact on the nature of work.