I’ve lost count of how many meetings I’ve been in where IT and Finance teams left the room feeling like they’d attended two different discussions. Finance thought it was about budgets. IT thought it was about priorities. Both walked away frustrated. This disconnect isn’t new, but it’s costly.
Finance speaks in numbers; variance, ROI, depreciation, run rate. IT speaks in services, uptime, licenses, and capacity.
The problem isn’t that either side is wrong. It’s that they’re operating on different abstractions of reality. When Finance asks, “Why did infrastructure costs go up 20% this quarter?”, they expect a clean answer. IT responds with, “Because we scaled up compute for the new data pipeline and added redundancy.” Technically true. Financially opaque.
And this gap is where misunderstanding and mistrust begins.
Most organisations unintentionally design it into their structure.
- IT budgets are created top-down, but managed bottom-up.
- Financial reporting aggregates spend into cost centres that don’t align with how IT delivers services.
- Technology value is measured in uptime or adoption, not in business outcomes or cost efficiency.
So while Finance is trying to control cost, IT is trying to maintain capability, and both are talking past each other.
Frameworks like TBM help, because they give structure and transparency.But tools alone don’t fix cultural and language gaps. True alignment happens when both sides start asking the same questions; not about “how much” or “why so high,” but about “what value are we enabling?” It’s the moment Finance stops seeing IT as a cost centre and starts seeing it as a portfolio of business capabilities. And when IT starts viewing financial discipline not as constraint, but as design input.
When IT and Finance learn to collaborate, everything changes.
- IT roadmaps start reflecting ROI, not just feature releases.
- Finance forecasts start including innovation metrics, not just expense lines.
- Business leaders finally see a unified view; cost, capability, and outcome in one frame.
It’s not a reporting problem. It’s a translation problem.
This is why I keep coming back to the idea of shared visibility. When everyone can see where the money goes, what it enables, and who consumes it; the conversation shifts. Tools that are built on the TBM framework provide the visibility. Architectural frameworks like TOGAF provide the structure. But leadership provides the bridge, by insisting on one shared language for cost and value.
Every rupee, dollar, or euro in IT tells a story; but only if both IT and Finance can read it the same way. Until that happens, we’ll keep optimising in silos; Finance cutting, IT defending, and the Business waiting. Transformation begins when we stop debating cost and start aligning on value.
Cirvesh
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