Achieving Financial Transparency

Reposted from Chuck’s blog entry on 10/26/2011:

You’re in the middle of a sequence of posts recapping the key thoughts and discussions resulting from EMC’s recent IT Leadership Council, the main theme being “IT Transformation”.

The background and context behind the event can be found here.  A more brief summary can be found here.

As a starting point, I wrote up Sanjay Mirchandani’s excellent foundational presentation “Leading an IT Transformation“.  Warning: it’s long, even by my verbose standards.

I folllowed that with a thorough recounting of Jon Peirce’s amazing presentation on “Organizing For Success“, which can be found here.  Warning: it’s even longer.

Presentation1During the event, we shared with the group that we were near completion of what we thought was groundbreaking work on a methodology for achieving financial transparency within the IT function.

Why is this important?  

At the end of the day, it all boils down to people and money as the big levers that IT leaders need to pull on.  Especially transformational IT leaders.  

Jon covered the people side at length.  I believe this white paper represents our best current thinking on how one goes about achieving financial transparency.

Any time there’s free market forces at work, intelligent choices tend to get made: what to invest in, how to measure returns, etc.  In many of our minds, financial transparency is the key enabler to achieving a virtual “free market” between internal IT services and the businesses that consume them.

Or, at least as close to one as we’re ever likely to get 🙂

Please — if you’re interested, take a moment to read this, and offer up your thoughts as to overall usefulness, how to improve, etc.  

We think it’s going to be a big discussion going forward.

About the Author: Chuck Hollis