Note: Today's post is part of an ongoing series that looks at various pitfalls in finance transformation and what can be done to avoid them.

Many of the challenges in finance transformation, such as lack of senior management support or the lack of stakeholder engagement, must be overcome in order to have an effective transformation program. Technology support is one of those areas that isn't black and white.

I say this because I honestly believe that because there are opportunities to engage in continuous improvement without large expenditures in technology, but I know from experience that companies with significant transformation programs are committed to technology investments that support the transformation strategy.

I once had a client that was developing a shared service center in the Far East to handled a number of countries in that region.  The center would handled a number of transactional processes, such as accounts payable, customer invoicing, fixed assets and general accounting.  Overall it was a successful implementation that met it's goals.  One challenge, however, is that various countries such as Japan require that certain documents like vendor invoices be retained in country.  A scanning and workflow package would have worked very nicely to get the information to the SSC while retaining the original documents in the country.  Unfortunately, this particular client was spending millions to get the SSC in place but wouldn't spring for the relevant technology to scan and route documents.  Instead, they chose to have their people fax the invoices to the SSC.  Yes it worked, but it created an inefficiency in the process when the transformation effort should have been focused on optimizing processes across the value chain.

This is one small example.  Other companies consolidate processes but still operate off of multiple ERP systems.  This isn't insurmountable, and there can still be real benefits to consolidation and shared services without the perfect, one instance, global ERP platform.  But there's no denying that it helps.  So don't stop improving and transforming in ways that don't require large technology investments, but be realistic about what you can achieve over the long-term without a comprehensive strategy of IT enablement that supports the transformation vision.