Financial management for CIOs

GOA: What should a CIO need to do to deal with finances when it comes to IT deployment in the company? Emphasizing on it, Rajeev Batra of Ernst & Young laid stress on some of the challenges CIOs are facing today in his address to the CIOs on "Financial management for CIO"

Addressing the CIOs gathering at the CIOL ‘C Change’ event, Batra emphasized on the fact that in all it is only 27 per cent of IT projects that actually see the light of success. 33 per cent of these projects becomes challenging, 23 per cent gets cancelled before completion, 50 per cent are failure in terms of meeting budgets, functionality and schedule.

These projects fail because such projects have no real connection to the profit and loss drivers of the business, so no business unit has vested interest in their success.

So to cope-up with such situations Batra suggested measuring the value of technology investment before the start of the project and that is only possible by improved communication, increment in organizational flexibility and streamlining knowledge.

But then there is a value proposition attached to it and for that it is imperative to measure potential value of the project, align it with business goals, keep the project focused, hold business unit accountable and measure your successes.

Some of the essential elements he talked about of an IT investment is that every project undertaken should have good ROI, it should be built on hard savings, have short time frame, accountability and low risk of disruptive failure.

CyberMedia News Service