To CIO, With Love, CFO

Perhaps nothing can boost CIOs more than a buy-in from the target audience within the organisation of the work their IT department does and finance is a critical part of that in-house target audience. Earl Fry, EVP and CFO of data integration software player Informatica Corporation was here in India, and Biztech2.0 caught up with him to understand how CFOs look at IT as a channel that enables them to perform their functions.

As the CFO of your organisation, what are the critical issues you deal with and how does IT help you to handle those issues effectively?

For any CXO, the three key drivers are growth, competitive advantage and change. These are the primary issues that I worry about. Increase in profit, access to customers, enhancing my competitive advantage, mergers and acquisitions, compliance and regulatory issues while dealing with global enterprises; all these are issues an executive is constantly looking at. As a customer, we need IT to develop an infrastructure that can deal with these issues.

Of primary importance for a finance department is the ability to access data. I, as a CFO, should not only be able to access that data but also the IT setup of my organisation has to ensure that those data should be accurate enough for me to trust so I can take right decisions pertaining to marketing, finance, HR etc. based on correct information. Further, I need a plug-and-play solution without much complication in operating it.

Today, from the user perspective, the problem I see is a lot of investment goes into the IT department in terms of storing data, buying applications for business processes; but what doesn’t get much attention is the fact that silos of information exist in every organisation, based on different custom-built applications – SAP, Siebel etc. Now, as an end user I want to know how to get all this information in one place without having to learn too many things on how to operate a particular application to access a particular information.

As a CFO, what role do you play in your company’s growth, and how does IT help you play that role?

I’m responsible for setting long-term finance targets; I set five-year objectives for each operation and then break them down to a one-year budget. As one of the CXOs I also look at the market along with others in my team and try to see how how the market would evolve with time. We look at our competition, startups and adjacent technology, and build up a strategic view of the evolving market. As a global company, we also look at regional growth – there are Americas, EMEA and APAC; we need to know where the future growth will be. I have a long-term goal, but at the same time I know things will change drastically within the framework I’m looking at. So I need an IT system that can accommodate these changes and allow me to work seamlessly despite these changes.

As a CFO, how do you deal with change and how does IT help you do so?

They say change is the only constant, and so we have to deal with change constantly and inevitably. For me, dealing with change the right way is more critical because these changes get into the process. I need to better understand where change is happening and what the organisation’s opportunity is. The IT organisation will help me deal with these questions by giving me a responsive, agile and-cost effective infrastructure. I, as a CFO, might look at a solution from a cost perspective and want to go for something cheaper, but I expect my CIO to show me the long-term scenario that goes beyond just cost – he should take into account multiple-year prospects, see through changes that will happen in that span of time, and how to address the pain points, deliver quickly and adapt our systems to at least 80% accuracy.

What should an IT budget look like for a CFO to approve it?

One attribute I really appreciate in IT plans is how well they are able to respond quickly to business needs by scaling up in a way that doesn’t require them to add more resources or budget. You know, our IT budget grew more slowly than any other department because they have been able to support growth cost effectively and we were able to focus more on sales, redistribution structure, regional expansion etc. I think the crux is to look where the company is going, enable long-term goals with the resources available, and try and make a difference within that. In fewer words, an agile and cost-effective IT plan will always have a CFO’s second hand.