Volatility is now the baseline, and the gap between AI leaders and laggards is widening rapidly. Technology leaders struggle to focus amid the increasing number of distractions. If you lack focus during your budgeting process, you risk funding yesterday’s portfolio while competitors institutionalize AI advantage. AI compounds this miscalculation faster than ever before. Avoiding this requires explicit decisions about what to scale, what to kill, what to avoid altogether, and what to experiment with next. This report provides a data-rich and research-backed game plan for what tech leaders need to do in the next 12 months.

If your IT financial management (ITFM) solution only explains where the money went, it’s already obsolete. CIOs need help deciding what to do next, not better reports. In the recently published The Forrester Wave™: IT Financial Management Software, Q2 2026, we see a clear shift from cost transparency to decisioning. The leading vendors are moving […]

FinOps X continues to be one of the fastest-growing and most action-packed events on our calendar. FinOps X 2026 outdid the prior year’s iteration with 2,500 total attendees, up 25% from FinOps X’s 2025 count. Last year, we wrote that AI cost management was a “nascent but growing” theme at the event. Wow, that has […]

In our evaluation of IT financial management (ITFM) software providers, we identified the most significant ones and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps you select the right one for your needs.

AI cost controls are solving the wrong problem. The real challenge is context debt—and until organizations manage it, spend will rise faster than value.

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, traditional financial management practices in IT fail to address the complexities of dynamic demand, third-party services like cloud, and sustainability needs. Technology executives must shift away from a fixed-cost mindset toward a variable cost mindset such that they can focus on optimizing value and align expenses with changing demands. Enter FinOps: A specialized practice within IT finance that focuses on cloud cost optimization. This report delves into the paradigm shift you must make, explains the relationship between IT finance management and FinOps, and provides insights that will help you navigate the challenges of modern IT finance.

CIOs are under relentless pressure to justify technology spend, accelerate AI adoption, and prove that IT creates measurable business value. Yet many CIOs are trying to tell that story with one hand tied behind their back. Their IT finance teams remain stuck in a record‑keeping mindset — excellent at reporting costs but ill‑equipped to explain […]

CIOs are under pressure to demonstrate technology’s contribution to business value and need IT finance’s help to build the story. However, most IT finance teams remain anchored in cost reporting rather than value analysis. Structural constraints — data debt, fragmented processes, and scarce crossover finance‑technology skills — keep most practices at low maturity, weakening the enterprise value narrative. CIOs must update IT finance’s mandate to gain the value‑centric financial partnership required to justify investments and accelerate AI transformation. This report provides the guidance CIOs need to advance IT finance maturity and build a stronger, outcome‑driven value narrative.

What does Forrester’s IT spend management framework mean for state, local, and educational (SLED) tech leaders? I connected with Yessica Jones, a former State of Arkansas CIO who recently joined the Forrester team, on this topic, and it produced some interesting observations: SLED tech leaders are not expecting funding cuts. In fact, in a recent […]

Anthropic gave leaders a blunt signal about planning for LLM charges when it introduced blended pricing for enterprise users of Claude recently. Enterprises with over 150 seatholders will now pay a blanket per-seat charge ($20 per seat at the moment), plus a variable charge based on API usage and which Claude model they’re using. When […]