Forrester’s 2025 Priorities Survey presents some interesting food for thought. We asked 700 tech leaders about visibility into IT spend across their organization, as well as where in their organization IT finance sits. What we found is that only about 60% of enterprises have IT Finance teams that sit in an IT organization, with the other 40% sitting in Finance. However, enterprises with IT Finance teams reporting into an IT org were 18% more likely to have high visibility into tech spend than those where IT Finance reported into a finance org.
Visibility is Critical to Spend Management
Visibility is a key factor in Forrester’s IT Spend Management Framework, a model for achieving IT spend management maturity and defining the success of your IT finance function. The model focuses on the visibility, control and optimization of IT spend – in that order. Visibility is the first piece – without it, you can’t understand what costs need to be controlled. And only once you have control over your costs can you begin optimizing them. We’ve even designed an assessment you can take right now to see if you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced.
This all underscores how critical a deep relationship between IT Finance and IT itself is to successful IT spend management. The closer the IT Finance team is to IT, the deeper its understanding of what drives IT costs, how to control them and how to optimize them.
This is not isolated to just Finance’s and IT’s visibility into IT costs. Embedded IT Finance teams are better equipped to communicate the story behind IT investments across all functions of the enterprise. This universal visibility is critical for any CIO trying to demonstrate the value their IT organization adds to the enterprise.
Drive Embeddedness to Improve Visibility
Does this mean CFOs and CIOs should drop everything and re-org? Probably not – every company situation is unique. However, it does present a strategic imperative to foster closer collaboration between IT Finance and IT. Embeddedness in IT not only enhances visibility, but also empowers teams to drive cross-functional insights essential for mature financial management. Some ideas of how to enhance embeddedness include:
Build stakeholder personas: spend a “day in the life” with stakeholders up and down the IT organization, getting to know how they work and what’s important to them. Then, create and maintain personas to inform reporting and decision making.
Sit in on important user groups: identify groups within IT where financial topics can be part of the agenda. For example, sitting in on a project management council or weekly staff meetings. These are easy ways to learn what’s important to IT stakeholders and identify what financial topics may need more support.
Educate Finance on IT: identify tools or capabilities in IT that can add value for the finance organization. Then, partner with IT SMEs to deliver an overview during a Finance town hall or staff meeting.
Encourage three-way meetings: include IT Finance in meetings between the IT lead and the business to review key strategic objectives. Involving IT Finance leads to better connectivity between the spend being incurred and the business benefit of the investment.
Let’s Talk About Embeddedness in Your Enterprise!
Want to learn more about your IT spend management maturity or how to improve IT spend visibility, control and optimization in your own enterprise? Take the IT Spend Management Maturity Assessment and set up a Guidance Session with me to talk about your results and what recommendations Forrester might have.
