The IT department may not be in control of its own budget for much longer, according to a Deloitte researcher.
Speaking at the Oracle OpenWorld convention in London last week, Hans van Grieken, the EMEA technology research and insights leader for Deloitte’s global CIO programme, said he saw the ownership of the technology stack moving to the finance function.
“IT does not own the tech anymore. This is something you see in research across the board,” he said.
Van Grieken used to work at Gartner and said his former colleagues had predicted that a tipping point would arrive when more of the technology stack was owned by the business. This point had now arrived, he said.
Still, it’s a complex picture, and the tension between the two departments is well documented. In part, it appears that finance leaders are themselves struggling to implement technology to deliver insights.
Gartner said in a recent note that the CFO will need to focus on three areas in 2020: finance analytics, finance organisation strategy and structure, and finance technology optimisation.
This is all in the effort to grow the business and improve operations, it said, reporting the results of a recent poll of finance leaders.
Tracing the evolution of the uneasy tension between finance and IT, Joe Fuster, the global head of Oracle CX Cloud, told ITWeb that the technology function used to be run independently; now finance was seen as an enabler of technology.
“The reality is that finance is there to make sure that we report our results every 30 days and that we don’t break things. IT is there to keep the lights on, because the innovation is coming from my marketing heads that have a revenue target.”
He said the chief revenue officer, meanwhile, will want to know how much the business is spending to acquire and serve customers.
“I believe the tension [between business and IT] is going away. I used to worry about shadow IT and servers under desks, but now it has all moved to the cloud and we can get better security in the cloud than I can produce in my own company.”
“Every conversation other than top-line revenue or risk gets you kicked out of the CEO's office.”
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