Should The CFO report to The CIO?

Is it Time that the CFO Reported to the CIO?

Attending an industry event the other week, I was struck by the comment that "CIOs were moving out from under the shadow of the CFO". The event was presenting the results of a recent global CIO opinion survey conducted by Harvey Nash and KPMG. Other questions had focused on who is responsible for Digital Strategy and it appears that Marketing is now giving this role up and starting to hand it back to the CIO.

Any reader who has worked in the finance industry will have long ago understood that "Money is Information", reversing the old adage that information is money. Basically, since almost all currencies moved off the gold standard, money has become nothing more than a promise or just life's brownie points. Its value only exists, because we chose to assign it value as it has no intrinsic value of its own. These days it consists of little more than data stored on some medium or being transmitted from point-to-point in transactions.

If this were the only issue then the CIO's claim might be considered a little tentative. However, in the modern digital economy, many industry pundits are quoting the statistic that "80% of an enterprise's value lies within its IPR". This IPR normally being stored and managed in the form of information (or sometimes knowledge embedded within IT systems and IT enabled processes). Given that digital businesses now appear to be outstripping traditional models in terms of growth, profitability and survival, it is a good time to review the relationship in many enterprises between CIOs and CFOs, and many are beginning to question it.

Personally, I am not sure that either should report to the other. CIOs should be there to help grow and sustain enterprise value. CFOs have traditionally been there to husband and protect money, ensuring sensible separation of duties. My experience has been that CFOs tend to come in 2 types: those who control (and tend not to be that imaginative about how to grow a business) and those who are entrepreneurial (and tend to be a bit too lax about controlling money). The former type is a bad fit for IT, the latter may be a good fit for IT, but can be bad for the overall financial health of the business. 

I do think however, that there are things that CIOs can learn from CFOs, in terms of the way in which budgetary control is shared within a business, but with the CFO providing the governance framework and control. CIOs should be doing something similar with information governance, so that information quality is managed appropriately.
CIOs can give back too. Increasingly CFOs are expected to provide Management Information services based on management accounting and BI. there's a lot which CIOs can advise on there with respect to techniques for fast delivery and ensuring that information integrity is maintained.
Its time for genuine partnership to help grow the business.