Could the CFO/CIO Relationship Cost Digital Transformation?

The accelerated move to hybrid work in the pandemic has helped to push up company spending on technology in part to make it possible for employees to work anywhere. For example, global spending on public cloud services is expected to rise 20% this year to $495 billion, according to Gartner.

At the same time, inflation and rising cost inputs are putting pressure on margins and making it increasingly important to take a look at how CFOs and CIOs can work better together to make sure the IT and tech investments they are making pay off, according to Randeep Rathindran, vice president of research in Gartner’s finance practice.

“CIOs and CFOs need to be joined at the hip,” he said in an interview, adding that the survey reflects that they don’t always understand how the other party thinks about the issues. “It doesn’t show there’s a massive divergence but it does show that they’re not completely aligned.”

Working more collaboratively likely yields better results because collegial partners “tend to act like members of the same team instead of creating decision-making friction by behaving as if their counterpart is trying to hold them back,” the Gartner report on the survey states.

Read the full article at CFO Dive.