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In today's world businesses are becoming fragile, technology is becoming smarter and open, and economic indicators are day-day unpredictable. Under this scenario, how does corporate CFO collaborate with enterprise CIO and CTO's to control the bottom line balance sheet and yet maintain the revenue engine to keep satisfied shareholders, customers, and business partners. There is an effective collaboration model required here which is lacking today in most large/mid size industries.

First thing is to get the CFO and the CIO to ditch their often-adversarial stances. I've rarely met a finance chief who wasn't highly skeptical of the company IT boss. Think it goes back to the notion that CFOs often don't understand technology that well. And CIO's tend to see CFOs as numbers-cops.

Second step: figure out the goals for a tech project (or department) and agree on how to measure progress (or lack of it). ROI doesn't always capture the true value of an IT project, but CFOs pretty much insist on some sort of ROI calculation. Suggesting other sorts of metrics that measure the full impact of a technology rollout might get the CFO in the CIO's corner.

Past that, I'm not sure.

The problem you point to helps explain why CIOs report to CFOs at most companies. The CFO is ultimately responsible for managing a company's assets, including IT, and that means earning an adequate return on any investment, i.e., one that will add value by exceeding the company's cost of capital. Of course, figuring out what investments will clear a company's hurdle rate is s a tall order, and a CFO is in no position to determine how exactly any technology investment will do that. So it seems to me that it's up to the CIO to help the CFO determine that. In the end, however, I don't think that's an issue of a particular communication mechanism so much as responsibility on the part of the CIO to understand how technology investments meet a company's overall performance goals and to be able to communicate that to the CFO. That assumes the CFO's open to the possibility that tech is anything other than a cost center. And if that's not the case, then all bets are off.

Certainly the onus is on both the CIO and CFO here. In a weak economy, the CFO should be looking at every tool at his or her disposal to support the company--and technology is clearly a major tool. And it's also a prime opportunity for the CIO to raise his/her profile by putting together projects that can show a strong, clear ROI, like RedConn refers to.

I'm curious about any specific examples you have of large/midsize companies where the CIO/CTO/CFO are not effectively collaborating or how you came to that broad conclusion.

While I was a CTO at about.com there was an acquisition then a reorganization and I was asked to report to the CFO of the company. I did not think the reorg made sense but I decided I would give it a chance and be a team player to see if I could learn from the experience.

There was no CIO position at the company at that time. I quickly came to realize the financial reporting systems were a mess ( mostly due to a series of acquisitions) and there was a standing order to the CFO to complete an Oracle Financials implementation across all business units on an accelerated schedule.

I was given a very small project staff to complete the Oracle rollout and an impossible deadline. Ultimately the project was completed, I learned quite a bit about financial systems, cultural dynamics across business units, and change management issues. I also realized that in this case the reporting structure emerged from a real strategic business need.

I believe this is the case in many companies but not all, it can be more political than practical. So my advice is to look for the benefit to the company before you look to the benefit to yourself. In most cases you will not be sorry you did.

I agree with Ron F. And I think any reasonably sophisticated CFO today understands the strategic value of IT investments. I believe it is on the CIO to articulate the value of technology investments to the organization's goals--not only to the CFO but to everyone across the company. After all, IT is a support function. CIOs must remember that for better collaboration with CFOs and other top executives. CIOs must also understand that much of finance decision-making is based on estimates. That is, the numbers CFOs work with are often (necessarily) educated guesses. Therefore, CIOs should provide CFOs with as much information as possible to help finance get the most accurate estimates for tech investments. Help the CFO help you, in other words.