Common Sense from a CFO in Charge of IT
CFO.com’s article on CFO’s who assume IT responsibilities had some gems in it. Read this for some amazing common sense best practices:
Owens [CFO] sees his IT responsibilities at Delhaize falling into three areas: aligning the IT strategy with the overall business strategy; making sure that IT investments contribute to the company’s growth; and ensuring that the right governance processes — such as service levels between IT and operational units — are in place.
Read that again- very succinct advice that should be taken to the bank. Continuing CFO.com says:
He leaves the finer details to CIO Terry Morgan, who reports directly to him. “One of the roles of a modern CIO is to orchestrate intelligent dialogue in terms that regular business people can understand,” says Owens. “Just as all business people need to have some sense of finance but don’t necessarily need to be completely fluent in GAAP, I don’t think that we [finance professionals] need to have a deep fluency in the really technical pieces of IT.” He adds that it’s important for IT staff to avoid putting him “on the back foot by speaking in tongues, rather than plain language.”
Once again, completely clear and to the point. My key take away is that CIO’s should be tasked with making the organization “technology fluent”.
What do you think? Is your CIO a strategist in an organization that has no idea what technology can do for them? The poor positioning of the CIO role, excarbated by poor advice from some of the biggest consulting companies in the world (who should know better), has robbed many organizations of profits.
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