A Partnership that can only win...The CFO and CIO..

I’m not going to start the blog saying how the pace of IT is rapidly changing and we need to buckle in for the ride– it’s a ‘state-the-obvious’ opener I’m trying to avoid….

Today I wanted to talk about the relationship between the CFO-CIO and how it’s more pivotal than ever. While progress has been made in IT and Finance alignment - if you’re still operating in a functional or transactional silo then you could be missing out.

This critical relationship can only help a company grow and prosper – helping to understand how information and technology bring business value, where it can reduce costs and where it can drive growth – setting the direction of travel for the rest of the organisation.

Digital transformation can only flourish when the leaders of these two great offices of progress come together. It sounds obvious but…I’ve recently spoken to a handful of CIOs in my customer meetings at FTSE 250 organisations and it surprises me that they don’t have a regular cadence with their CFOs? Technology is clearly pivotal to solving business challenges ?- including those within finance…surely if there’s no two-way communication it undermines digital progress and little can take off as it should.

I guess both need to see how the other can benefit them, a CIO needs to grasp that technology needs to deliver financial return and the CFO needs to understand the importance of innovations and investment needed in tech. The modern CFO drives digital projects forward as they can see the value and educates the CIO on IT costs, the modern CIO makes sure the CFO has access to high quality data and automates processes for them.

One of the best examples of this alignment is in the enterprise adoption of Workday, where CIOs and CFOs are accessing the same cloud management solution to extract information make the right decisions – based on real-time data. However, even those that have made leaping investments in their ERP architecture are still not being as transparent as they could be and working as one!

Silicon + Carbon is always the answer to great technology driven change.

Roadmaps for such change need to be created together, co-authored and filtered into the organisation. With Workday Adaptive the CIO and CFO can plan for every eventuality and forecast together, be on the same page and drive through meaningful change where needed. In my experience Workday is a leading example of where technology brings everything – and everyone – together. It allows decision makers to base their roadmap on facts and tangible real time insights, it can help many organisations scale and grow as a result. When I see or hear it work the best with my existing customers is when I hear Finance teams making suggestions to their internal Workday Product teams saying they need x y z to make a particular process easier and quicker.

The bi-directional chat between Finance and IT is crucial especially when investing so much in cutting edge tech like Workday.

I still feel there’s more to be done to win though…