Gartner Research

10 Top Trends Shaping the Controllership Function

Published: 11 May 2023

Summary

Digital innovations raise questions about the controllership’s future value proposition. Corporate controllers can use this research to learn of and take action on 10 trends shaping the function. Trends include process-level innovations, digital acceleration and an emerging decision support mandate.

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Overview

Opportunities
  • Although most controllers aspire to create a digitally ambitious function that can successfully experiment with and leverage emerging autonomous finance solutions, many remain overly conservative in applying these objectives — hyperautomation was among the lowest surveyed priorities for controllers in 2023.

  • Most controllership organizations struggle to balance competing digitization and process improvement initiatives due to difficulties in governing these discrete workstreams, preventing improvement project benefits from being fully realized.

  • Controllers face pressure to create more scalable delivery models, as the function continues to maintain the highest proportional finance budget allocation of all finance teams.

  • Controllers want to acquire more well-rounded talent, encompassing

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