In many companies, the CFO and CIO can easily oversee 2,000 to 4,000 people and given the nature of their respective charges — finance's to reduce risk without overspending and IT's to increase benefits from the organisation's technology assets — they have sometimes been at odds on where investment should and shouldn't be made.

The explosion of data is changing the CFO/CIO relationship

With the importance of information access and business analytics on the rise, the need for a stronger union between the CFO and CIO is clear. However, in a Deloitte CFO Signals survey, only a little over half of the CFOs said they have the information they need to effectively manage the business. Therefore, it is imperative that CFOs and CIOs act now, to understand the wealth of data available in their organisations and how it can help drive more informed business decisions.

However, who controls organisational data has become unclear

Then, there is also a matter of control. In many companies, control over corporate data is unclear — some see CIOs as responsible for data management given it resides in corporate IT systems. Others see the stewardship of data being the explicit domain of business users. But the issues of data ownership and control have increasingly become a source of frustration for finance in its quest for data to enhance decision making.

In this quest, however, it is the CFO who is in a logical position to oversee the techniques to make business decisions. Informed by information and analytics, CFOs can make improved decisions on everything from the correct level of capital spending to the alignment of incentives.

By aligning as an enterprise around how decisions are made, the techniques employed, the analytical engines created, and the information delivery tool set used, both CFOs and CIOs can radically increase the impact they make within the organisation.

  • Align the business. In many companies, there may be alignment on the shared missions and objectives at the macro level, but alignment becomes more difficult to sustain as you get down into segments, business units, and divisions. The CFO/CIO must aim to achieve common objectives around data and the alignment of incentives to encourage the right behaviours in the use of information.
  • Develop a shared language. When the organisation speaks the same language, CFOs and CIOs can be more effective in guiding decision making through getting information to the people who need it in the time and format requested, reducing the time-wasting discussions about whose number is correct.
  • Encourage job rotation. One solution for bringing the relationship even closer is to borrow from the finance playbook: make IT executives do business rotations and vice versa. For example, we have collapsed accounting into shared services, and we are now recommending talent development pools that include rotations. In this case, the business analysts of the future are going to be those functional executives who rotate in IT and finance.

In my next blog I will look at the key questions a CFO must ask the CIO, in order to get the most out of data analytics.

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