If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he'll jump out. If you put the same frog in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, you will get a very different result.

Many CFOs and corporate treasurers in the United States today—especially CFOs and treasurers of multinational corporations—find themselves in the situation of the slow-boiling frog. The technologies and workflows that their organization has used for years are unable to keep pace with both business-as-usual activities and escalating disruptive events such as a bank or trading-counterparty default, legal judgments or fines, a currency devaluation, a fraud event, a qualified audit result, or a merger or acquisition.

Who has time for strategic planning when you are constantly fighting fires? Yet for many companies, no single disruptive event has been dramatic enough to prod the finance function to jump out of the boiling water and into a more efficient way of doing things.