I recently had the opportunity to ask four finance executives from a range of industries — pharma, academia, consulting and retail — what irks them about IT. If you assume their complaints were industry-specific, you’re wrong. In fact, there are remarkable similarities, and the grievances flowed freely.
This might come as a surprise, as more than 80% of the IT executives responding to our 2013 InformationWeek Global CIO Survey rated their relationships with finance as good (48%) or excellent (33%). Unfortunately, your CFO may not feel quite as simpatico.
Top gripes include:
1. The stickiness of the status quo: “We end up with very large budgets that keep us parked in yesterday,” says Keith Perry, VP of finance for Rexanto, which works with pharma companies to add efficiency to the supply chain. It’s the classic 80/20 conundrum, where huge investments in legacy technologies keep IT glued to the past. Most CIOs don’t like that situation any better than CFOs, but they’re often too busy keeping legacy systems running to figure out how to make the break. At least, that’s the charitable assumption. The more jaded tend to conclude that change takes effort, and automation and cloud have an inverse effect on IT job security. Thus we cling to expensive, aging data centers and manual processes.