Frustrated because your business is down and your IT department can’t find ways to respond? If you’ve structured your financial reporting on IT as I suggested in my prior blog, you should be able to quickly look at the following actions and evaluate their desirability and impact:

1. Stop projects – Make each project rejustify itself with a new hurdle rate.

2. Lengthen refresh cycles – There is really no good reason to upgrade PCs these days, and many vendors’ software packs contain fixes for functions you don’t use. The next time IT tells you they want upgrade because Microsoft has put out a new version, ask them, “So what?” more

Finance folks tend to think in terms of annual budgets, balance sheets, Capital vs. Operations, and cost centers. IT folks think in terms of keeping things running and delivering on requests. Rarely do the two match up, certainly without help.

It is possible to create a view of IT spend that can be used for both managing IT and feeding the Finance and Accounting (F&A) processes. Done correctly, it will also give the company tools to speed decision-making on expenditure and create ownership of consumption, which drives much of IT cost. more

Hello, world. I’m Richard Ross, and I have an opinion on IT. In over 30 years in IT, I’ve built and sold it, bought and supported it, and advised others on how to do the same. If I didn’t have an opinion by now, I suspect you would be wondering what I was doing with my time for all those years.

This blog is about IT in finance, which is a very broad topic indeed. Its intended community is CFOs who might have IT reporting to them or at least be responsible for IT financials included in their companies’ reporting. It will also be useful to investors. We’ll cover a broad spectrum of topics that I think you should know about, ranging from IT management to regulatory requirements to specific products and events.

I’m going to start the blog with several posts about what have emerged for me as universal truths regarding how one looks at and manages IT. These will serve as a primer on some basics and help to define terms that we can use going forward. I expect we’ll refer back to them in the days to come. After and in parallel to those, I’ll post commentary on topical events and, of course, in response to your posts. ###