Views: 15
Summary – Faced with budget overruns and value erosion when Finance remains a bystander in tech projects, late involvement exposes business and IT to cost/benefit gaps. Involving the CFO from the outset, formalizing a Finance-IT governance charter, validating business KPIs and projected ROI, and establishing a decision log with quarterly reviews ensures strategic alignment and agile trade-offs. Solution: entrust the CFO with digital leadership to frame the vision, steer the roadmap by metrics, and oversee post go-live follow-up to maximize gains and stabilize adoption.
In many organizations, technology projects are viewed merely as IT initiatives to be funded, without truly involving Finance in their oversight. This approach often leads to budget overruns, limited business ownership, and a lasting loss of value.
CFOs who adopt a proactive stance transform these projects into performance levers by keeping the business at the center and establishing clear governance with Information Technology. They engage from the project’s inception, make trade-offs based on expected value, and ensure continuous monitoring after go-live, guaranteeing the sustainable achievement of financial and operational goals.
Strategic Role of Finance at Project Initiation
Finance must reclaim the lead in defining the vision and business objectives. The CFO is not just a budget guardian but a transformation driver.
Vision and Strategic Alignment
Launching an ERP project or a financial tool without formal validation of the expected value exposes the company to major discrepancies between expectations and reality. By validating financial objectives, business key performance indicators, and projected gains upfront, Finance ensures that every feature contributes to the overall return on investment.
This phase requires a detailed mapping of impacted processes, quantification of temporary productivity losses, and estimation of recurring benefits. As a visible sponsor, the CFO sets a shared direction for both operational departments and the IT team.
An explicit vision from the outset limits counterproductive technical trade-offs and ensures the chosen solution aligns with the company’s financial roadmap, regardless of the functional scope covered.
Clearly Defined Roles and Responsibilities
Without clear role definitions, Finance quickly becomes a bystander, unable to influence strategic choices or priorities. The CFO must therefore formalize each stakeholder’s responsibilities in a project governance charter.
This charter specifies who approves scope changes, arbitrates evolutions, and measures budget variances. In its absence, IT teams may accumulate costly customizations or non-prioritized developments.
By strictly separating value management (Finance) from technical execution (IT), the company avoids sliding into a client–vendor mindset and retains control over its future operating model.
Case Illustration
A small financial services firm began deploying a new ERP without involving the CFO in defining the key performance indicators. As a result, the custom asset management module was delivered late at double the cost, with no significant improvement in financial close processes.
This example shows that too-late financial oversight risks building superfluous features. The company had to convene a restart committee, establish a corrective plan, and abandon several customizations—eliminating 20% of developments that were not aligned with business objectives.
It underlines the importance of strong CFO engagement during the pre-project phase to frame the scope, identify quick wins, and prevent deviations from the first functional workshops.
Shared Finance–IT Governance
The partnership between Finance and IT must be based on shared governance rules. Every technical decision should be evaluated for its impact on value creation.
Principles of a Structured Partnership
A healthy Finance–IT relationship is neither a client–vendor dynamic nor a transfer of responsibility. It rests on a common vision and iterative trade-offs, where Finance owns the value roadmap and IT proposes the technical solutions.
The CFO attends steering committee meetings, approves customization budgets, and ensures that each investment is backed by a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Regular exchanges prevent unilateral decisions and maintain alignment between business objectives and technological choices.
This approach reduces dependency on external providers by limiting unjustified developments and promoting the use of modular, open-source components aligned with strategic priorities.
Shared Governance Mechanisms
Maintaining a decision log is a simple yet powerful tool for recording all trade-offs. Every scope change, budgetary exception, or technical deviation is documented and justified with an estimated ROI.
Additionally, quarterly reviews allow the roadmap to be reassessed based on achieved results and evolving business needs. The CFO thus gains concrete indicators on progress, budget adherence, and value creation, while IT can adjust its priorities accordingly.
These mechanisms ensure agile governance: the company can quickly halt underperforming modules and reallocate resources to more promising gains.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Continuous ROI Metrics and Trade-offs
Decisions must be based on clear financial and operational metrics. The CFO should define and track tailored indicators for each project phase.
Defining Appropriate Success Metrics
Before launch, the CFO sets quantifiable KPIs: reduction in closing time, decrease in input errors, productivity gains per user, and so on. At each milestone, variances between forecasts and actual results are measured and reviewed in committee. Negative variances trigger immediate corrective actions, while positive variances may lead to reallocating resources to other optimizations.
Agile Decision-Making Process
When an unexpected scenario arises (for instance, a technical delay or a new business requirement), an agile decision-making process facilitates prompt resolution.
This process relies on pre-populated “what-if” scenarios: each scope variant is quantified by additional cost and estimated benefit. Stakeholders thus have a reference framework to choose the option offering the best value-for-cost ratio.
By doing so, the company retains control of its budget, minimizes project delays due to lack of agreement, and keeps focus on priority issues.
Sustaining Value After Go-Live
Project success is not measured at go-live but by the actual realization of benefits. The CFO must oversee stabilization, adoption, and data quality.
Post Go-Live Governance and Stabilization
Upon production launch, processes are stabilized through a dedicated follow-up committee. Finance approves the operational transition plan and the business team’s upskilling.
This phase addresses residual issues, refines configurations, and ensures interface robustness. Without financial involvement, traditional governance may overlook costly anomalies that are expensive to correct later.
Monitoring Adoption and Data Quality
Business adoption is measured by indicators such as the usage rate of key features, frequency of input errors, or number of support tickets raised. Finance tracks these metrics to confirm that projected gains materialize.
Concurrently, regular data quality audits verify the consistency, completeness, and reliability of information used for reporting. Data-cleansing procedures and governance processes must be implemented to preserve the project’s long-term value.
Turning IT Funding into a Sustainable Performance Lever
An engaged CFO activates value creation from initiation, establishes collaborative governance with IT, guides every decision with ROI metrics, and ensures post-go-live follow-up.
In a Swiss context where financial rigor, data reliability, and risk management are critical, this digital leadership is more than an advantage—it determines the success of digital transformation.
Our experts are here to help you structure your governance, define your success metrics, and sustainably manage your technology projects.
