Are Financial Directors the new IT Leaders?

Are Financial Directors the new IT Leaders?

By: Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, IT Editor, Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON), I recently spoke to a conference of financial directors. It was interesting to have a non-IT audience at a conference, but the really interesting thing about the financial director community is that they are becoming the new IT leaders. Go back a decade or so and the IT function always reported into the finance director, but then the CIO grew in stature. IT leadership was seen as strategic and essential, so the CIO got a place on the board and reported straight to the CEO.Then we hit the great recession of the noughties. Suddenly the IT leader was reduced to a backroom office, shuffling supplier contracts and just focused on keeping costs down. No more skunk works or innovation centres. The IT leader was told to just keep the lights on, not endlessly change the company.And that has meant a big return to the old model of IT reporting through the finance director. I just read a pre-publication copy of tech journalist Angelica Mari's new book Reboot: IT Leadership in the Information Age' where she documents that almost half of all IT bosses now report to finance, and the trend is for that to be more than half anytime soon.Of course anyone can argue that a little knowledge is dangerous. I remember once being interviewed by a university where I wanted to study English literature. I claimed to have a love of James Joyce only to find that one of the professors on the interview panel was a Joyce scholar and proceeded to quiz me on the real meaning of Finnegan's Wake.Finance directors need the guidance of the CIO because IT suppliers offer solutions featuring techno-babble and only the CIO has the expertise in managing contracts through years of outsourcing experience. That's the theory anyway.But how come there are now so many instances of guerrilla IT choices made directly by business function heads?Have you ever emailed someone at a big, supposedly, professional firm, only to get the email bounce back with the message mailbox full'? It looks terrible, especially if it is bouncing back from an IT firm. I've seen this in a number of organisations and the workaround today often seems to be that individuals put their email on divert to Gmail. Gmail never lets them down. The mail always arrives there, and they can send email from Gmail with the real address masked and replaced by their corporate address. So their contacts don't notice any difference, but they get an email system that works.But the IT department has nothing to do with this email solution. Their strict policies over mailbox sizes and the use of a particular product or supplier for email may in fact be a significant part of the problem.Entire sales teams rejecting the in-house CRM system and setting up on Salesforce.com without asking for permission and paying by-the-user-by-the-month is another great example. The business users know what tools are out there today. The IT leader cannot insist on them using a particular system just because that's what the company invested millions in buying.The finance directors might just start considering the CIO to be less strategic after all. The individual business heads may have less experience of outsourcing and contract management, but if the end result of devolving purchasing power to those using the systems is that they achieve more business success then does the CIO have a future role at all?Perhaps only running infrastructure to the Internet, so all those cloud-based business tools run efficiently?This article was first published on the SSON website; click here to read the original article. http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/are-financial-directors-the-new-it-leaders-3866894.html

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