Finance leaders are investing record sums in technology and AI, with most CFOs naming digital transformation their top priority for 2026. Yet a growing number of programs hit every technical milestone while leaving the way organizations actually make decisions unchanged. According to finance transformation leader Werner van Rossum, the reason is almost always the same: the work is sequenced in the wrong order, and the most consequential decisions are made before the first line of code is written.
Deloitte’s most recent CFO Signals survey reports that 50% of North American CFOs name digital transformation of finance as their top priority for 2026, and 87% expect AI to be very important to their finance department’s operations. The strategic direction is clear: senior finance leaders of companies across the United States plan to move their finance operations swiftly into modern technology to capture the benefits and assist their companies in gaining a competitive advantage. The investments are material. Three-quarters of CFOs globally expect their technology budgets to rise this year, with nearly half anticipating increases of 10% or more, and close to 60% planning to raise finance AI investment by 10% or more, according to Gartner. According to Werner van Rossum, the real question companies should ask before committing is whether that investment will change anything that matters.
As finance organisations adopt artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, many are also strengthening governance frameworks around data quality, model transparency, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. These considerations are becoming increasingly important as finance teams rely more heavily on AI-supported decision-making.
This broader shift is reflected across the finance industry. McKinsey & Company has noted that the organisations creating the greatest value from digital finance transformation are those that combine technology investment with changes to operating models, governance, decision-making and workforce capabilities. In other words, technology alone is rarely sufficient to deliver lasting business impact without corresponding organisational change.
When van Rossum walks into a finance transformation program, he starts by asking a question that most program teams have not been asked before: which decisions in this organization need to be supported by finance, and how will the transformation improve them?
The question tends to produce a long silence.
“Most programs can tell you exactly what technology they are deploying and what the intended go-live schedule is,” says van Rossum, a global finance transformation leader at ExxonMobil who has spent more than a decade leading large-scale financial operations and transformation programs across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. “Very few can tell you which specific business decisions will be better as a result of the investment, or why.”
That gap, between technical delivery and decision impact, is what van Rossum has made his professional focus. His diagnosis of why it persists is increasingly finding an audience among finance leaders who have lived through transformations that delivered on every technical metric and changed little about how their organizations make decisions.
The Sequence Problem
Van Rossum’s central argument is deceptively simple: finance transformation programs are almost universally initiated in the wrong order, and that sequencing error locks in failure before the program has properly begun.
“The instinct is often to start with technology,” he says. “Because the business case is easiest to build around a platform, and a timeline is a simple construct to structure an implementation around – it gives the feeling of control. And there is enormous pressure from senior leaders, from system integrators, from program management, to get moving and deliver on schedule. So organizations select a platform and then try to design their governance around what the platform can support. That is precisely backwards.”
The right sequence, in van Rossum's framework, inverts the sequence. Governance clarification comes first: which decisions require enterprise-wide consistency in the information that supports them, what the real cadence of strategic commitment looks like, and what good analytical output means from the perspective of the decision-maker rather than the analyst. Operating model and metric harmonization comes second. Technology deployment comes third, at which point platform selection becomes significantly more tractable because requirements are derived from decision needs rather than vendor capability assessments.
“When you do it in this order, technology becomes a solution to a well-defined problem,” he says. “When you do it in the conventional order, technology becomes the definition of the problem, and everything else has to fit around it.”
The pattern van Rossum describes is visible in the wider data. Even as budgets rise, successful execution is becoming rarer: only 10% of organizations now describe their technology implementations as fully scaled and continually evolving, down from 25% a year earlier, according to KPMG research. Spending is accelerating while the share of programs that mature into lasting capability is falling.
The challenges described are not unique to a single organisation. Across industries, finance leaders are increasingly discovering that digital transformation programmes often succeed technically while falling short strategically when governance, operating models and decision processes are not addressed alongside technology implementation. As organisations invest more heavily in AI and automation, aligning technology with business decision-making is becoming an increasingly important determinant of transformation success.
What Decision-First Design Looks Like in Practice
Van Rossum’s perspective carries weight because he has run the sequence he describes, at scale, more than once.
Leading financial planning and analysis for ExxonMobil's energy products business across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he redesigned the regional operating model around the decisions the business actually needed to make. The results were material: manual planning inputs fell by 99%, from roughly 300,000 to 1,000, stewardship processes were automated, and the team's capacity shifted from backward-looking reporting to forward-looking analysis. When his organization delivered the corporate plan under the redesigned approach, the planning process shifted from bottom-up consolidation to outcome-driven design, removing more than nineteen days of work across functions.
The same philosophy produced a series of analytical tools designed around specific recurring decisions rather than general reporting needs: a cost-of-goods-sold analysis capability that gave leadership a consistent view of logistics cost drivers across markets, an operating expenses analysis tool that restructured how the organization evaluated operating decisions against demanding annual targets, and a workforce planning capability that connected staffing choices to forward business outcomes.
“None of those started as technology projects,” van Rossum says. “Each one started with the decisions that leadership needs to make repeatedly and was making with inconsistent information. You design backwards from the decision. The technology follows.”
In his current role, leading the financial planning and analysis transformation within the multinational energy company’s enterprise-wide modernization, the same sequencing logic operates at a larger scale: a new, improved unified key performance indicator data model focused on decision enablement, designed to hold up across legacy systems and the new platform alike, so that the information the organization needs to support its decision making and measure performance survives the technology transition intact.
The Work Nobody Wants to Do
The reason most programs skip governance clarification, van Rossum argues, is not ignorance. It is that the work is genuinely hard in ways a focus on technology implementation alone is not. The evidence bears this out: despite record technology budgets, the proportion of companies reporting fully mature, continually evolving implementations has fallen sharply, suggesting the binding constraint lies in organizational design rather than tools.
“Governance clarification requires senior leaders to negotiate about and align on informational authority,” van Rossum says. “Who owns the definition of a key performance indicator when two business units measure it differently? Whose planning assumptions take precedence when they conflict? These are not technical questions. They are political questions, and they touch on accountability structures that powerful leaders can have strong incentives to leave ambiguous. Yet that ambiguity is exactly what needs to be resolved for the organization to converge on clarity for decision-making. It is a difficult challenge, and one worth resolving.”
The CFO is often uniquely positioned to lead these discussions because finance sits at the intersection of strategy, governance and enterprise-wide decision-making.
“The finance leaders I have seen deliver transformations that actually change how their organizations make decisions are the ones who held the line on doing this work first,” he says. “They start early, before the wider program takes shape, to avoid a slowdown later. The ones who start later and skip this step in the spirit of meeting a timeline, and let platform selection drive the governance design, consistently delivered programs that hit their technical milestones and ended up missing their strategic objectives.”
From Practice to Published Frameworks
Van Rossum has written extensively about his practitioner observations. He has published a series of articles on decision architecture and planning design frameworks in outlets including the World Financial Review and the European Business Review, where van Rossum has argued that planning architecture, governance design, and decision systems are increasingly becoming competitive differentiators for large multinational organizations.
"The research gave me a way to be precise about observations I had for years," van Rossum says. "The gap between analytical capacity and decision impact is not random. It has a structure. And once you understand the structure, you can design against it."
For van Rossum, the finance function's most important contribution is not the production of better information, but the creation of conditions under which better information shapes better decisions.
“Finance leaders have spent decades trying to earn a seat at the strategic table by improving their attribution to business value,” he says. “The ones who have actually earned it did something different. They changed the conditions under which their analysis reached decision-makers. That is a governance problem. And it has a governance solution.”
