Beyond The Org Chart: The Real Challenge Of Finance Model Redesign

An Operating Model Is More Than A Structure

Gartner’s framework breaks the finance operating model into several distinct categories of decisions that CFOs need to make deliberately rather than by default, arguing that no two finance functions will land on an identical answer given differences in business context, talent and regulatory environment. Among the categories Gartner highlights:

• Ways of working: More collaborative and transparent approaches to work, including behaviors, informal workflows, team customs and methods such as agile and lean.
• Decision rights: Who on the finance leadership team, and across the business, actually holds the authority to make a given decision, how that decision gets made and how disputes get resolved.
• Talent: The competencies, skills and profiles finance actually needs to execute the redesigned model, as distinct from the skills its current staff happen to have.

The point isn’t that any single category matters more than the others; it’s that a transformation built around one or two of them, typically technology and structure, while leaving the rest to sort themselves out tends to disappoint. Gartner’s own reporting on the subject has found that many CEOs feel their company’s technology spending hasn’t delivered the time-to-value they expected, and Connelly’s team places at least part of the blame on the absence of an operating model that clearly sets out which principles should guide the trade-offs a transformation inevitably requires.

Shared Services Show What Happens When Cost Stops Being Enough

Nowhere is that operating-model gap more visible than in shared services and global business services, the delivery models that have anchored finance transformation for decades. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Business Services Survey, which gathered responses from leaders in more than 30 countries, found that roughly 50% of organizations have achieved savings of more than 20% from their GBS operations, rising to 55% among organizations with a dedicated global GBS leader role. Those are real numbers, and for years they were also the entire pitch.

They no longer are. “What has become clear is that cost is a deteriorating value proposition,” Kort Syverson, a principal at Deloitte, has said of the survey findings, adding that a GBS organization now has to diversify its value rather than rely on cost savings alone. The same survey found more than half of GBS organizations now name next-generation capability development and customer experience as top priorities, alongside cost, and roughly two-thirds plan to invest in generative AI over the next three years. That’s a meaningful shift in what these organizations are being asked to deliver, and it’s one that a purely structural view of transformation, get the shared-services footprint right and the value follows, doesn’t fully account for.

Finance remains the largest function inside these delivery models by a wide margin, and separate Deloitte research on reshaping finance operations found that nearly 90% of GBS organizations include finance in scope. Yet the same research points to the operating-model gap directly: Fewer than 30% of organizations are actively redesigning work, jobs and careers around AI, even as they deploy the technology itself. In other words, most finance functions are automating tasks inside a structure, and a set of roles, that hasn’t actually changed to reflect what the automation makes possible.

The People Question The Org Chart Can’t Answer

That gap between technology and the human side of the model shows up again in research from EY. The firm’s 2026 Global DNA of the CFO Survey found that finance transformation depends as much on people, behaviors, skills and ways of working, as it does on systems and data, and that CFOs face a persistent gap between ambition and action: Finance leaders increasingly see themselves as responsible for shaping enterprise value, but consistent leadership follow-through lags, particularly on decisions where the payoff is uncertain or long-term. The survey’s recommendations for CFOs pursuing transformation include several that speak directly to the categories an org chart alone can’t capture:

• Redesign finance roles and operating models specifically to reduce operational burden and create genuine capacity for insight and decision-making, rather than simply automating existing tasks.
• Build AI readiness by strengthening data foundations and shifting from defensive use cases toward strategic, growth-focused applications.
• Elevate people and culture as core priorities in their own right, on the logic that technology investment only translates into results if the transformation is actually sustained by the people using it.
• Accelerate leadership development to close capability gaps and strengthen succession pipelines, rather than assuming existing leaders will simply grow into a redesigned model.

Why The Model, Not The Chart, Is The Real Deliverable

None of this means org design is unimportant; a finance function with the wrong reporting lines or the wrong center of gravity for shared services will struggle regardless of how well everything else is designed. But treating structure as the transformation, rather than as one input into a broader operating model, is precisely the pattern that both Gartner’s research and Deloitte’s data point to as a recurring source of underperformance.

The practical implication for CFOs is less about adding more workstreams to an already complex transformation program and more about sequencing: deciding, before the org chart gets redrawn, what ways of working the function actually needs, who should hold which decisions, and what talent the redesigned structure will require to function as intended. That sequencing matters because each of these decisions constrains the others; a structure built before the ways of working are defined tends to lock in exactly the habits the transformation was meant to change, and talent decisions made before decision rights are clarified often produce roles nobody quite knows how to use.

An org chart can be redrawn in an afternoon. An operating model, built around how people actually make decisions and do their work day to day, takes considerably longer to get right, which is exactly why it’s the piece so many transformations quietly skip.