For as long as there has been technology, there has been a struggle for power between the enterprise
There is evidence, however, that things may be changing a bit – evidence that the CFO’s influence in the enterprise may be extending more into the areas where the CIO traditionally ruled, and it’s due – at least in part – to SaaS and the Cloud.
A survey performed by Gartner and Financial Executives International revealed a number of interesting results which indicate that the balance of IT procurement power may be shifting within the enterprise. 344 senior financial executives were surveyed, and they revealed that:
- in 45% of organizations, the CFO makes or leads IT investment strategy
- about 75% of surveyed CFOs said they have little confidence in their own IT departments
A CFO.com article on the subject also mentions a KPMG study from April, in which it was reported that “73% of CFOs identified IT as the greatest
With the emergence of “cloud” computing solutions, and the plethora of application and service options now available to businesses, some businesses have concluded that “the CFO is better equipped for the cloud world”. The belief is that the CFO is more attuned to the processes of vendor
The real issue here isn’t a struggle for power and influence, it’s a change in priorities. IT should be focusing on innovation and improvement of processes and profitability through efficiencies gained with technology, not on defragging hard drives and running software updates. Who understands better than the internal IT department the time-consuming and frustrating nature of maintaining user environments and applications? Who in the organization has the technical understanding, coupled with a direct business understanding, sufficient to explore new ways of approaching various process or workflow problems? I think most business IT managers would agree that addressing issues that have a potential to radically improve the way a business operates is much more challenging and interesting than selecting the right make and model of server.
Outsourced IT models, SaaS, and the cloud can provide the independence from day-to-day IT management chores and give IT pros the time and opportunity to really innovate in the business. An article on SearchCIO says ” The IT organization of the future will focus more on consulting and guiding the business in technology decisions than on building or even running IT.” I agree.