If you ask a typical CFO what changes during a finance transformation, they’ll likely point to the new organizational chart. It’s the visible trophy of change: a centralized shared-services hub here, a specialized center of excellence there, a streamlined team over yonder. It’s clean. It’s communicable. It fits neatly on a slide for the board’s approval. And that, according to a growing chorus of research, is precisely the problem.
For decades, the blueprint for change in corporate finance has been structural. The logic was compelling and its results measurable. Take the global business services (GBS) model, for instance. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Business Services Survey found that about half of organizations achieve cost savings exceeding 20% through these centralized operations. For years, that number was the entire business case. But the ground is shifting. Kort Syverson, a principal at Deloitte, notes a pivotal change: “What has become clear is that cost is a deteriorating value proposition.” Today, more than half of GBS leaders rank next-generation capabilities and customer experience as top priorities alongside cost, with a majority planning significant investments in generative AI.
This shift reveals a critical flaw in treating reorganization as the end goal. A new chart rearranges boxes and lines, but it doesn’t automatically redefine how work gets done, who makes decisions, or what skills are needed for the future. Emily Connelly, a senior research director at Gartner, puts it bluntly. Many initiatives, she argues, “focus too heavily on technology or organizational structure and underinvest in other categories of operating model decisions.” The consequence? CEOs often feel their hefty technology investments fail to deliver expected value. The org chart becomes a facade, masking the fact that the underlying operating model—the real engine of how a finance function creates value—was never fully designed.
So what is an operating model, if not the org chart? Gartner’s framework breaks it into deliberate decisions that CFOs must make rather than let happen by default. It includes ways of working—the shift toward agile, collaborative methods; decision rights—clarifying who holds authority and how disputes are resolved; and talent—defining the future skills needed, not just cataloging the ones you currently have. The point is that a transformation built only on technology and structure, while leaving these human and process elements to chance, is built on shaky ground.
Nowhere is this disconnect more tangible than in the race to adopt AI. Separate Deloitte research finds that while nearly 90% of GBS organizations include finance in their scope, fewer than 30% are actively redesigning work, jobs, and career paths around the AI they are deploying. We are, in effect, automating the tasks of yesterday within the structures of yesterday. We insert a powerful new engine into an old chassis without redesigning the car. The EY 2026 Global DNA of the CFO Survey underscores this gap, noting transformation depends equally on people, behaviors, and skills as on systems and data. It finds CFOs struggle with follow-through, especially on long-term people decisions, despite recognizing their role in shaping enterprise value.
The practical implication for finance leaders in Budapest, Warsaw, or anywhere else isn’t about adding more complexity to an already daunting program. It’s about sequence. Before you redraw a single reporting line, you must ask: What new ways of working do we need to support? Who should truly own key decisions in a more automated, data-rich environment? What profile of talent will we need to hire and develop to make this new structure thrive? A structure designed before answering these questions tends to cement the very behaviors you aimed to change. Talent hired before clarifying decision rights often ends up in roles that are confusing and underutilized.
An organizational chart can be redesigned in an afternoon. A true operating model—the living system of how your team works, decides, and grows—takes patience and deliberate design. It’s less photogenic, but it’s the only thing that turns a box on a slide into genuine, sustained change. The next wave of finance transformation won’t be won by those with the neatest charts, but by those who build the most resilient and human-centered models beneath them.
