Iberdrola S.A. is a large international utilities company. The company's business environment has changed rapidly in recent years as a result of the various phases of privatization, deregulation, and the resultant industry restructuring. During the past two years, a shared service centre (SSC) has been established in Bilbao, Spain, consolidating processes that were formerly dealt with in individual business units (such as power generating stations) in many separate locations. The manager in charge of the finance function explained some of the issues as follows: 'We actually run ourselves on process lines - "Purchase-to-Pay" or "Procurement-to-Pay", and "Orderto Cash". The Sales Ledger is consolidated nationally but the rest is all done locally - we run software systems that these days allow you to have both remote sites and central operations and there is still visibility and transparency across the organization. The same applies to the nominal ledger and other accounting. We do all the statutory accounts centrally now and the main database, the main nominal ledger, is based on a server in this building. But, of course, the data can be accessed anywhere. The accounts are still "owned" by the local Finance Director, Finance Controller and finance teams out in each one of the local business units. The finance people in the local business units need to "own" the statutory accounts even though they don't prepare them these days. If they don't "own" the accounts, then they are signing something without understanding what's there.'

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Discuss how the organization and culture of the finance function in Iberdrola S.A. has been affected by new information technology, the deregulation of power generation and the more recent post-Enron concerns with financial probity. You might find it helpful to refer to Zoni, Dossi and Morelli (2012).