Corporate odd couple can drive operational success: the old cliches about the bean-counter versus the gadget guru are hard to shake. Yet, today's CFOs and CIOs can find common ground for productive collaboration by embracing technologies like performance management.

• Author: Manley, Tom
• Position: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

For many business executives, it's a conventional boardroom image. The CIO pleads his case for some over-acronymed technology that promises to transform ... well, transform something. And the pinstriped CFO, with green eyeshades and money clip, pores over spreadsheets while slowly shaking his or her head in disapproval. They never seem to agree on anything meaningful.

Is the cliche really true? Are today's CFO and the CIO a little too much like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger--Neil Simon's legendary "Odd Couple?" For forward-thinking enterprises, the corporate variation on those stereotypical images--the expense-obsessed bean counter and the gadget-evangelizing guy with the pocket-protector--are about as relevant as an old floppy diskette of VisiCalc.

The good news is that more than ever before, information technology (IT) and finance are ideally suited to cooperate and collaborate. In the Internet bubble years, there may have been an understandable tendency on the part of some organizations to implement "tech for tech's sake." The bursting of that bubble has led to a more sober assessment of what technology is actually needed to drive business goals.

IT is no longer the black box; today's generation of financial professionals--indeed, the vast majority of all enterprise employees--are far more comfortable with, even fluent in, a wide range of technologies. That's fostered a greater transparency and trust between IT and virtually all areas of the business. There's a greater appreciation of the IT discipline and, of course, far greater expectations as well.

Viewed properly, IT is not simply a utility service--it's a strategic resource. The question becomes: what's the best way to leverage the strategic business opportunities that effective IT/finance collaboration can provide?

Performance Management: Forum for Finance/IT Collaboration

Today, finance and IT increasingly share common goals and a unified vision--for both pragmatic and strategic reasons. From a pragmatic perspective, the CIO and CFO are virtually joined at the hip, thanks to an increasingly strict environment for corporate governance that has led to new levels of collaboration to ensure documented compliance with explicit regulatory frameworks.

But, from the more important strategic perspective, finance and IT face an unprecedented opportunity to work together to drive their business forward in bold and innovative ways by embracing performance management as an enterprise-wide discipline.

Until recently, performance management has largely been viewed merely as a compartmentalized function for most organizations. The notion of understanding and monitoring current performance while planning future business strategies seemed like a noble goal. But it has fallen short because of an absence of a true partnership...