Blog: Craig Schiff

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June 24, 2008

The Future of IT?

It's no secret that in many companies the relationship between Finance and IT can be somewhat strained. Business performance management (BPM) initiatives tend to bring those underlying tensions to the surface. For BPM to succeed Finance and IT need to work closely together as a team. In some companies there is such strong disagreement around BPM approaches, priorities, and technologies that they fail to reach consensus and the project simply stalls out. Of course if there was a good senior executive sponsor in place they could break through the logjam, but many companies fail to fill that role with the right person. A company we have been working with recently has absolutely no Finance/IT issues to deal with. The reason is that they took a proactive approach to head off problems of that type. They simply have the CIO reporting to the CFO.

The end result is that Finance and the business heads determine their needs and IT fulfills them. Since it is run out of Finance all projects have to fit within the financial goals of the company and demonstrate a reasonable return. Sounds like a wonderful world. The company by the way is not some crazy start-up where they also have Chief Happiness Officers, but a major organization with over $ 50 billion in annual revenues. Is this the future of IT? If this is such a great approach why aren't more companies doing this already? For one thing, it would be very difficult to change to this organizational model after the fact, especially with existing staff in those roles. For another, this approach has some of its own challenges. Does it stifle healthy debate? Do we lose some checks and balances? What caliber of CIO would be attracted to this position being subordinate to another department head? No approach is perfect. Maybe just the possibility of something like this coming to pass might make some CIOs take notice and work a little harder to get along with Finance.

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