"CFOs can make a real difference to the success of their organizations," notes Hope. "But to do so they need to build a credible finance team that will be seen by managers as a trusted and valued business partner.

'Their accounting expertise is taken for granted, but continuous involvement -- not just checking or validating decisions that have effectively been made -- is essential. As a business partner the finance team needs to be involved in many more tasks, such as strategic planning, forecasting, resource management, project management, process improvement, decision support, operational effectiveness and risk management."

To alleviate the pressure, the office of finance must create more time and build capability. "The first task of the CFO is to liberate both finance and business managers from the huge amounts of detail and the proliferation of complex systems that increase their workload and deny them time for reflection and analysis," says Hope. "Creating space and time for higher value work is the crucial step that turns the transformation rhetoric into practical reality."

The CFO can build capability and capacity by empowering people lower down in the organization to make the right decisions and act on them, he adds. This will filter out a lot of data which otherwise ends up on the CFO's desk.

In addition, Hope suggests the CFO simplify the budgeting process, the general ledger and reporting systems, reduce the number of measures and spreadsheets, derive more value from IT and remove the constraints of transaction processing through outsourcing.