Successful CIOs are no longer tasked with just keeping the lights on. They power innovation, enable agility, and drive measurable business outcomes. In our recent report, IT Finance And FinOps Practices Are Converging Across Organizations, we uncover that almost 30% of enterprises exceeded their IT budgets in 2024, indicating a strategic failure beyond mere budgeting issues.

IT Finance And FinOps Need To Converge

One root cause is that FinOps and IT finance teams have historically operated in parallel, even as the scopes of both practices have expanded; the footprint of FinOps has grown into SaaS and on-prem costs, while the scope of IT finance has grown to include cloud spend. This split makes it difficult for CIOs to optimize total IT costs across different environments.

To tackle hybrid IT complexity, CIOs are merging IT finance and FinOps to create highly integrated models. Notably, 33% of enterprises already combine on-prem and cloud cost management groups into the same organization. This percentage will grow as demand for real-time cost visibility across the organization increases.

What Bold Leaders Are Doing

High-performance IT organizations are merging FinOps and IT finance to manage technology spend more effectively. They’re:

    • Combining the teams. They create dedicated groups that handle both traditional IT finance and FinOps, managing costs across cloud, on-prem, SaaS, and labor from one place.
    • Centralizing the data. They invest in platforms that show all technology spending in a single dashboard, making it easier to align investments with business priorities.
    • Making it a discipline. They move from fixing cost problems after they happen to preventing them, enabled by better collaboration between IT, finance, procurement, engineering, and business units using the same data and tools.

How To Get Started

Four foundational moves can help you get started:

    1. Break down silos. Create cross-functional teams that include IT finance, FinOps, engineering, procurement, and business stakeholders. Shared accountability is key.
    2. Invest in visibility. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Implement tools that provide real-time insights into spend across all IT domains — not just cloud.
    3. Align spend to business outcomes. Map IT investments to business capabilities. Don’t just report costs — show how those costs drive growth, efficiency, or customer experience.
    4. Build a culture of financial agility. Encourage teams to treat financial data as a strategic asset. Train IT leaders to think in terms of unit economics and value streams.

The Future Is Integrated

In five years, IT finance and FinOps won’t be separate disciplines. They’ll be integrated into a unified IT finance capability that, alongside strategy, portfolio management, enterprise architecture, and governance, enables CIOs to deliver technology outcomes that the CFO can confidently fund and the business can measure. The organizations that embrace this convergence now will be the ones that lead tomorrow with smarter investments, tighter controls, and clearer business impact.

Our upcoming state of IT finance report will dive further into the future state. In the meantime, book a guidance session or inquiry with us to discuss how you can do more to integrate IT finance and FinOps. We’ll also be at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summits for EMEA (October 8–10 in London) and North America (November 2–5 in Austin, Texas) if you’d like to connect live!