The Controllers Council recently held an expert practices presentation titled “CFO & CIO Alignment: Smarter Budgeting for 2026 and Beyond,” sponsored by VAST.
Our subject matter experts were Ted Weitzel, VP of Finance and Operations at Logik.io, which ServiceNow has recently acquired; Dean Comber, VP of Information Technology at the Illinois Health and Hospital Association; David Gutowsky, a senior IT procurement and contract professional; and, finally, Tyler Smith, a cloud engineer at VAST.
The following are key takeaways from this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
Where do you see the biggest disconnect between Finance and IT today? What practical steps have you taken to build stronger collaboration?
Dean: I think from being on more of the IT side of the house of things, but also having exposure to accounting and finance, trying to solve for that disconnect has probably been a legacy challenge for a lot of finance and IT operations traditionally. And I always try to balance it’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon. A lot of what I try to do with our corporate finance team is provide them with the necessary education, but in layman’s terms, on some of the things that are not only new to us but are new to them. I try to meet with them as much as I can monthly to kind of review the PNL in our balance sheet, especially from a CapEx perspective, to understand where we’re currently tracking. And that almost kind of leads us from a little bit of an annual budget to almost a rolling budget because we have so many things that are coming our way that we feel that can provide the utmost efficiency and effectiveness for us, especially when you’re talking about some of the AI components in the technology sector. The other thing I do on an annual basis is I meet with all our business line leaders. We have about 14 different business lines that we facilitate within the organization, from a non-dues revenue perspective, dues revenue, and operational components.
Ted: Number one, relationship building in your organization, right? Like creating relationships with other people who are doing other things in your organization is so key. And then two, explaining where you fit in, how you can help, and where you’re going to be. And then I think three is the biggest thing is we’re all potentially in these tracks where we have expertise. And Dean said, Hey, I need to educate everybody or help them understand what it is that we’re bringing to the table. Where finance, like you’re an expert in what you’re in. Finance is an expert in what they’re in. The rest of the organization is all there to do another thing. What brings us all together? And it’s all about communication and understanding how we get to the same place, or like, where we want to go together? Relationship management will make your company so much more successful than having a bunch of experts that don’t get along.
How do finance and IT teams evaluate when to reduce physical footprint versus continuing to invest in on-prem infrastructure?
David: A lot of organizations are still having on-prem versus cloud or some kind of hybrid of some sort. But the reality is that you might have a lot of different applications that you’re utilizing today, legacy applications that for you to kind of evaluate if you can even move them to the cloud, you must do kind of total cost analysis, total cost of ownership. So, you really want to look at can you even move that application to the cloud? Because you might not even be able to. You might be still on an application type interface that might not be a web interface. And then you might not be able to move that to the cloud. And if you could, it might be cost prohibitive. But you really must ascertain really what is your priority. A lot of IT organizations are moving towards like, hey, I’m not really in the hardware business, and they’re moving a lot more to like leasing, which kind of pulls in your finance teams, because there’s OpEx versus there’s CapEx. There are things to consider on that.
For organizations mid-journey in cloud adoption, what are the key financial or operational pitfalls to avoid, and how can CFOs and CIOs work together to prevent them?
Tyler: What you see is sometimes organizations really doing a specific application focus migration, where you also need the platform in play, that platform engineering. So understanding where you’re landing those applications, having those disaster recovery plans in place on those to ensure that one region failure will not take out your business for half a day. So, just focusing on the application is not enough. Need to make sure that you’re focusing on the platform that you’re moving to and having the expertise of that platform, whether it be multiple clouds or one cloud, is important to understand and survive those kinds of events.
Ted: It all goes back to like how we’re going to drive customer and employee success. What is the best way to service your customers? What is the best way to service your team? It’s a challenge. I think the biggest thing that has brought finance and accounting together in my experience is going through SAS 70 or an ISO audit, right? Because all of a sudden, your engineers and your IT professionals are kind of understanding the rigor that finance folks go through, and they absolutely require your help, versus the finance folks requiring the other side of the house’s help. And going through that process together is the biggest thing that brings the teams together. And then as long as you’re both focused on how we service the customers the best and how we service our internal team the best in the most economical way.
How have you seen the relationship between Finance and IT evolve as more organizations adopt AI and cloud technologies?
Dean: I would say our organization is a little bit. I don’t want to say necessarily reactive, but we are in a sense, especially from the health care sector, of where AI is going to ultimately play in not so much on the efficiency aspect of it and automation. But where is the data that we’re using that may have PHI in it? Who’s aggregating that data? Where is it ultimately going? We want to be careful with that, not only for ourselves, but also as we educate our member hospitals in Illinois, because they’re looking at the same thing as well. And I try to kind of position it really into two swim lanes, essentially, is where can we add value added functionality for our staff, whether it’s something like co-pilot or even them using chatGPT. But on the other swim lane is where can we really get advantage of AI for the stuff that we do in informatics with our data.
David: The thing is that everybody’s trying to rush to AI to make sure that they don’t miss an opportunity. Everybody’s trying to figure out how can we incorporate our business processes into AI. There’s also HIPAA compliance and stuff like that. But you must really consider where that data is going? If you can put that data in isolation, then it’s less of a security issue. However, if you want to do it generally, you’re going to have to make sure that your data is secure, which it probably is not. But I would caution to rush it in too much into this. There are some companies out there that are taking a more cautious and practical approach to trying to find things where it might make sense. The best thing to do is just listen to your staff where they think they might be able to apply that and then explore that with experts that are building LLMs and use suppliers to your advantage. Suppliers can be beneficial, especially if you don’t have any knowledge in-house. There are a lot of great tools that software packages are already adopting.
Ted: When it comes to AI specifically, being able to keep up with all your certifications and any compliance is such a huge thing that you need to think about as an organization. And then also not outsourcing the human creativity that you have to some sort of robot. Everyone’s in a seat for hopefully a unique reason and a specific thing that they bring to the table. There are great ways to leverage AI, and there are really good things that can happen, but it has to be very thoughtful, and you have to go one by one.
As we look toward 2026, what’s the biggest challenge you see in aligning IT budgets with financial forecasts, and how are you addressing it?
- Economic Uncertainty: Volatility and rising costs are making long-term forecasting difficult
- How to address this challenge: Building flexibility into commitments
- Balancing Innovation with Cost Control: Finding ways to fund AI and cloud expansion while managing existing infrastructure expenses
- How to address this challenge: Adopting FinOps tools and spend analytics
- Vendor lock-in and pricing escalation: Recurring IT contracts and SaaS renewals often increase beyond forecasted budgets
- How to address this challenge: Renegotiating SaaS contracts
- Compliance and governance costs: Meeting evolving data privacy and security standards adds unplanned financial strain
- How to address this challenge: Close collaboration between finance and IT, and encouraging transparency and shared KPIs
Learn more about aligning your finance and IT teams. Watch the full webinar here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
VAST provides IT services and cloud management solutions to companies and organizations across the United States. Their services help businesses reduce costs and simplify the management of their evolving on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and SAS environments. VAST is a provider of solutions and services for leading public and private cloud platforms, enterprise storage, infrastructure, data management, and cyber resilience technologies. They were founded in 1989 and are headquartered in Downers Grove. For more information, visit them at vastitservices.com.
