What will it take for you to call Finance?
This is my first blog post at Forrester. And as Forrester’s new IT financial management analyst, I’m sharing my greatest success story from the past 10 years in finance roles supporting enterprise IT. It’s when I got a call from IT.
IT professionals have better things to do than get in the weeds with Finance. But as enterprises have become more focused on the ROI of their IT investments, Finance and IT have become inextricably linked.
This makes for strange bedfellows. A CIO’s job is to deliver AI uses cases, protect the company from security breaches, manage data integrity and so on. CIOs don’t want to be bothered with accruals and capitalization.
Where these two worlds meet is when it comes to defining the value that IT adds to the enterprise. Tools like cost-benefit analysis, Total Economic Impact® and TCO have enabled IT to attach a number to the contribution it makes to the enterprise in terms everyone across the enterprise can understand.
In many companies, the practice of defining the value-add of IT starts with the biggest, most “strategic” investments. But what’s happened in my experience is, if done successfully – if IT and Finance are able to successfully partner and tell the value story for the company’s most important IT investments in a language that all understand – then the partnership goes viral and becomes part of the culture of both organizations.
Which brings me back to my story. I had just successfully partnered with IT to get Exec Committee support for a $50M CRM transformation investment. On the heels of that success, I got a call. Not from the CIO, not from anyone else in the C-Suite, but from a project manager who had heard about the work Finance and IT had done for the CRM investment. He wanted to know if there was a simplified financial analysis he could use to support a $500K middleware decision between Vendor A and Vendor B. And that’s when I knew we had something – when both IT and Finance saw the value in working together, not just at the C-level, but across all levels.
So I come back to my original question – what will it take for you to call Finance? Because to me, that is the key to IT financial management. The partnership between two areas that don’t always speak the same language, but which together have an amazing value story to communicate across the entire organization.
This is going to be fun!
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