From service providers to strategic partners: transforming support functions for the future

In the current business landscape, Finance, HR, and IT can no longer operate as siloed service providers reacting to business needs. Instead, they are becoming proactive enablers of value creation, strategy execution, and resilience.

The evolution of these functions’ roles is driven by increasing market volatility, rapid technological advances (especially AI), tightening ESG and other regulatory demands, competition for talent, and changing expectations of employees in a hybrid working world. Finance, HR, and IT are well positioned to navigate companies through these changes as they are natural stewards of people, data, and technology, all of which can be seen as the sources of future competitive advantage.

Finance: Driving profitable growth and strategic agility

The role of a modern finance function is not only to ensure compliance and efficiency but to become a central actor in driving enterprise value creation. Finance can enable smarter scenario planning, forecasting, performance and risk management, as well as dynamic resource allocation. All of these can raise the organization’s strategic agility and spot opportunities for value creation. Alternatively, the company may get into severe challenges if these processes are missing or improperly carried out.

Recently, we at August supported one of our clients, a leading company in its sector, in crystallizing a vision for its Finance function. The company had set ambitious strategic objectives, and the top management saw that the Finance function was in a key position to support and steer strategy execution. Together with the client’s senior finance leaders, August concretized how the Finance function could in practice contribute to strategy execution. The key levers for Finance were:

• Proactively deliver real-time data-driven insights for business management and decision making (e.g. by building transparency into performance drivers)
• Run efficient, scalable and fit-for-purpose finance processes and systems (e.g. by applying modern financial technologies)
• Enable shared clarity on key business targets, priorities and performance (e.g. by driving the continuous business steering processes)
• Support the company in transforming faster than competitors (e.g. by running an agile resource re-allocation process)
• Facilitate the necessary cross-functional collaboration to solve acute daily and weekly problems (e.g. by defining and following an operating model with crystal-clear roles and responsibilities)

These levers can be applicable to a wide range of companies. When developing the Finance function’s capabilities and ways of working to better support strategy execution, it is critical to understand the needs of businesses and other support functions, and based on this knowledge, build a pragmatic vision and transformation roadmap for Finance to deliver true business value-add.

HR: Unlocking high organizational performance

Transformation of the HR function is equally vital. In many organizations, HR is moving away from being a transactional people services provider to one that unlocks talent and creates an environment for high organizational performance. This requires a renewed focus on people, leadership, culture, and the systems that enable performance.

In modern organizations, it is the people that make the difference. HR is in a central position to attract, develop and retain critical talent for strategy execution. In addition, HR should ensure that the culture, leadership principles and practices are aligned with the strategic vision. For example, if a company aspires to be entrepreneurial and nimble, bureaucracy and rigid processes must not get in the way. The strategic vision and desired behavior should be supported by culture, social recognition, leadership practices and performance measurement.

Organizational performance is not only driven by a clear strategy and an efficient operating model but also understanding what drives high performance at the individual level. Only a small proportion of people’s behavior at work is governed by rational, conscious thinking. The majority is driven by emotion, intuition, social dynamics, and environmental cues. This means that high performance is not created solely through structures, processes and metrics, but it also emerges from meaning, belonging, recognition, and shared purpose. Effective HR functions focus on both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ levers and actively build environments in which people are both inspired to contribute and equipped to grow.

IT: Powering efficiency, resilience, and digital growth

The IT function is also undergoing a dramatic shift in its role and expectations. Beyond infrastructure management, IT is increasingly tasked with enabling new digital offerings, supporting process efficiency and innovation, and protecting the organization from cyber threats.

Modern IT functions balance two equally critical missions. On one hand, they ensure the stability and scalability of core systems, delivering seamless tools, high-quality data, and reliable platforms to support efficient operations. On the other hand, they co-create value with the business by developing new digital solutions that enhance customer experience, improve productivity, and unlock new revenue streams.

This dual focus requires a strong internal capability base, as well as orchestration of external vendors. It also requires collaboration between IT and business teams and a culture where technology is not seen just as a support tool but as a driver of strategic advantage.

AI: A common catalyst across all functions

Across all three functions, Finance, HR, and IT, AI is emerging as a transformative force. Nowadays, AI applications range from analytical and generative AI to agentic AI. Generative AI is already shaping the way companies operate, and agentic AI (or AI agents) will further transform the way business is done and bring about whole new capability requirements for companies.

In finance, AI is increasingly used for tasks such as automated invoice handling, fraud detection, demand forecasting, and variance analysis. These applications not only reduce manual work but enhance the quality and speed of decision-making.

In HR, AI is applied to recruitment (e.g., intelligent candidate screening), employee engagement analysis, learning personalization, and predictive modeling for talent retention. These tools enable HR to move from reactive, manual HR services to proactive, data-driven talent strategies.

Within IT, AI supports everything from anomaly detection in cybersecurity to predictive maintenance of systems and intelligent automation in service management. The ability to process and act on vast amounts of data in real time is redefining what is possible in terms of responsiveness and resilience.

The key for organizations is not just to implement AI tools, but to embed them into ways of working and support a learning culture to develop the needed skills to use the AI tools.

Leading the transformation: from cost centers to strategic enablers

Transformation of support functions requires a clear vision aligned with business strategy, continuous collaboration with business, and a willingness to rethink ways of working.

Organizations that embrace this change can reach new levels of performance:

• Finance supports profitable growth and strategic agility with scenario planning, forecasting, performance and risk management and dynamic resource allocation
• HR has a central role in unlocking the full potential of people and creating an environment for high organizational performance aligned with the strategy
• IT focuses not only on managing core IT platforms but protecting the organization from cyber threats and contributing to the development of digital solutions driving productivity, customer satisfaction and growth

It’s time to ask: are your finance, HR, and IT functions enabling strategy execution and value creation — or just keeping the lights on?

For further information, please contact:

Mikko Pulkkinen
Partner 
+358408442149
firstname.lastname@august.fi

Juha Martikainen 
Partner
+358407564686
firstname.lastname@august.fi

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