The cultural resistance to change can be overcome. Mission St. Joseph's Health System in Asheville, N.C., cut its annual budget preparation time nearly in half this year by using Hyperion's Planning software, replacing a tedious process that relied on Excel spreadsheets, paper worksheets, and custom applications. The change sparked grumbling among 100 departmental directors before the budget process began July 1. But the software caught on quickly, says financial-reporting manager Chris Wilde. Ease of use was key: Training for each user took only 30 minutes.

For many finance organizations, spreadsheets are the primary tools for producing budgets, forecasts, and revenue reports because people know how to use them. But spreadsheets don't let CFOs and CEOs drill down to the transactional level, a problem in a time when those executives can be held personally liable for faulty financial data.

Yet buying new financial systems won't help if CIOs and CFOs don't work together to properly plan deployments. "Not enough CFOs sufficiently understand their current [IT] process structure and data models," and so they can't make the business case for financial systems transformation, says Richard de Moll, VP of the finance and employee transformation practice at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Together, he says, the CIO and the CFO must develop a plan of what financial information they should provide to top management, how they should build the data architecture, and how they can break down barriers between business units so there's a uniform data model across the company.

At Grainger, collaboration between finance and IT is part of the culture. "The encouragement from senior management is that we do things together," VP Brown says. The CIO's team takes responsibility for maintaining the service levels of financial applications, and finance makes sure the company has the best technology.

Having the right product for the job is important, because some companies don't need all the features the big applications provide. Sunburst CFO and treasurer Chuck Warczak admits that the hosted PeopleSoft apps, which the company retained when it was spun off two years ago from former parent Choice Hotels International Inc., are "probably overkill for a company our size." Privately held Sunburst has annual sales of about $140 million and just fewer than 2,000 employees.

Larger companies may be underusing financial apps because of employees' comfort level with older processes or a lack of training. Changing attitudes about how business is done must start at the top, says David Siesel, a 25-year IT professional and long-time CIO now working for Tatum CIO Partners LLP. "The CEO or board has to say that having clean data, data analysis, and data on demand is critical to the survival of the business," he says. "They have to say they're going to invest in change management and the systems."

That's happening at Hillenbrand, where the CEO and CIO share ownership of its $200 million effort to integrate business processes, including financial applications, with back-end IT systems. "The business leaders see this as a business transformation," says CFO Sorensen. "They need to be visible, high-profile cheerleaders to get buyin all the way down the pyramid."

For more on Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's CFOs: Driving To Finance Transformation study, click on http://www.us.cgey.com/transformfinance