There is definitely a tight finance/IT connection. I work with IT, and I can't believe the technology terms I'm using sometimes. Sure you still have a wide spectrum of knowledge, and some resistance from finance. But there is more involvement overall.

I do think we try to automate too many things. In fact, sometimes it's to the point where it takes longer to set a task up for automation than to just do it. For instance, we all want beautiful canned reports to do analysis. But we waste more time prepping the system to get the answers. I still see a lot of value in having a financial analyst pull the data, and apply thought to it.