FLEXIBLE delivery of emerging technologies to drive business outcomes is fast becoming today’s competitive battleground. Deloitte research found that 56 percent of CIOs expect to implement Agile software development, DevOps, or a similar flexible IT delivery model to increase IT responsiveness1 and help spur broader innovation ambitions.

But there is an obstacle currently slowing these efforts, and it is formidable: the sourcing and distribution of funds. IT’s operations and development processes are becoming nimbler and product-focused while the finance function continues to budget, fund, and report the same way it has for decades. The result: tension between IT’s needs and finance’s procedures. If left unaddressed, this issue could impair the CIO’s innovation agenda and undermine an organization’s strategic goals.

Nowhere is this tension felt more acutely than in funding strategic innovation and transformation agendas, which currently account for a small percentage of IT’s overall budget. (The average IT department spends 56 percent of its technology budget on maintaining business operations and only 18 percent on building new business capabilities.²) This is especially true for development initiatives that emphasize agility and speed. Finance processes are typically still tied to a project mentality, where the fallacy of predicting the future for unique product development (with unknown unknowns) is locked into a project plan with associated fixed project funding. Instead an “agile” approach—referring in this context to a state of being nimble or flexible rather than to Agile software development methodology—is capacity funded with a focus on maximizing outcomes.

Moreover, agile initiatives typically feature cross-functional teams working in iterative sprints. In many companies, this clashes with the finance organization’s traditional funding processes, which are optimized for functionally compartmentalized teams. The cross-functional teams model hails from an era that emphasized repetition and scale of known and knowable assets, unlike today’s innovation-focused digital age.

Over the next 18 to 24 months, we expect to see more IT and finance leaders working together to develop flexible approaches for funding innovation at the speed of agile. This does not mean they will replace annual budgeting cycles with a shiny, unproven alternative. Indeed, balancing fiscal control and appropriate spending with value creation and financial results is a nonnegotiable requirement. There are multiple approaches that can help maintain the balance:

• Change within finance. Finance should explore opportunities to tailor budgeting, funding, and reporting processes to better meet the business’s evolving needs for its portfolio of technology investments. This will likely include developing new methods for investing across time horizons, accurately measuring the somewhat unpredictable long-term value that products built with agility can generate, and accounting for value in ways that meet accounting and reporting standards.
• Change within IT. The future of the IT organization includes structural changes such as organizing resources around products and outcomes, creating a clear road map for foundational tech investments, and evolving traditional roles in procurement and vendor management.
• Creative funding. Creative funding sources can amplify and accelerate change. CIOs and CFOs can explore opportunities for funding innovation such as co-investing within and across their industry, ecosystem subsidies, carveout leasebacks, and other models.

Unlikely, you say? Convincing your CFO to alter long-standing financial processes may be a hard sell, at least initially. What’s more, external funding opportunities may sound promising but could introduce risks that give CFOs pause.

Yet there are strong incentives for both CIOs and CFOs to find ways to reimagine finance to bolster technology’s potential. As more large organizations demonstrate agile’s positive impact on speed to value, flexibility, and responsiveness to market needs, their competitors will likely launch their own agile initiatives at speed and scale.³ Building distinctive, disciplined approaches now can lead to sustained competitive edges. The time for CIO-CFO collaboration on this issue is now.

Money matters

The tension between IT’s funding needs and finance’s long-held processes did not appear overnight. It has been building slowly over the last decade as cloud and platform technologies steadily disrupted operating models in ways that cause the finance function to reevaluate its methods.

As CIOs and CFOs look for ways to better meet their respective needs in the coming years, there are three central problems to consider—all of which trace their roots to the early days of the digital revolution.

• Shifting from capex to opex. Transitioning from on-site to cloud-based systems involves shifting a significant amount of spending from capital expenses (capex) to operating expenses (opex). In fact, teams will be doing a little bit of capex and opex all the time. The new mantra is “you build it, you run it.” From an accounting perspective, short-term opex growth can affect quarterly results, which CFOs must explain to investors and financial analysts.⁴
• Measuring elusive ROI. Technology innovation initiatives are often experiments that fall short of internal rate-of return expectations and may or may not deliver positive returns. Investments in innovation don’t typically offer traditional IT projects’ level of confidence, financially or temporally, so they are often hard to confidently champion through standard governance processes. In some instances, this leaves the finance function struggling to develop an accurate process for tracking ROI long-term. This challenge becomes more complicated in tracking fixed budget investments in things such as platforms that can be reused over an indefinite period.
• Calculating value delivered. CFOs rigorously track returns on capital and associated risk models across areas of investment. But for technology investments, few organizations show similar discipline in tracking and measuring the magnitude and timing of solution value—when CIOs make their own calculations, they may use assumptions that differ from those typically used by business or finance. In Deloitte’s 2018 Global CIO Survey, 65 percent of respondents said they measured the impact of IT investments on a case-by-case basis, rather than as part of a regular reporting process.⁵ Clearly, CIOs and CFOs are not on the same page when it comes to assessing the value IT delivers.

As part of the finance and the future of IT trend, we expect to see more CIOs, CFOs, and their respective teams explore ways to address these and other funding, accounting, and reporting challenges.

Finance transforms capital deployment

CFOs and their organizations can be the arbiters of rapid change, balancing necessary controls and risk management with modernized techniques for budgeting, deploying funds, and working with technology and business leaders to continuously monitor and optimize impacts. Some techniques include:

• Risk-based portfolio mindset. Many organizations struggle to justify significant funds for innovation and disruptive technologies—the likelihood of failure can be high, and the upside of success isn’t always straightforward to quantify. Treating investments as a portfolio is important; thoughtfully developing the governance and attributes of the portfolio is more so. Shoehorning prototypes of disruptive technologies into classical five-year ROI calculations is likely to generate either wildly optimistic valuations or widespread risk aversion. Treat investing in emerging tech as you would buying call options: The CFO and management team can make measured bets while getting information to more confidently guide future investment and mitigate future risk.⁶
• Capex versus opex strategy. Every technology investment has risks, and those made in cloud are no different. Because cloud shifts technology investments from the capital expense to the operating expense column, moving to cloud too quickly can affect company financials. CIOs and CFOs can work together to classify these costs appropriately and assess and optimize the impact of cloud investments. They can also develop strategies for depreciation and capital allocation to offset any impact.⁷ The good news is that the capex-versus-opex issue may not rattle Wall Street much longer. Deloitte studied how a set of public companies communicated their cloud investments to Wall Street and how analysts responded. The capex/opex issue did not appear to be a significant consideration in filings, commentary, and analyst discussions. In fact, companies may be underselling and underutilizing their cloud investments. Analysts appear to be more interested in how cloud adoption can lead to potential new revenue streams or revenue enhancement than in its potential for cost-reduction. ⁸
• Capacity-based funding. The idea of fixing IT budgets around explicit capacity, tweaked annually, is not new. But as technology organizations move from project to product orientation, those teams increasingly represent dedicated multidisciplinary staff from across the business and IT. Now, “capacity” is tied directly to customer, market, or supporting value streams. Road maps of growth objectives and investment needs define existing and future funding, measured not in IT-speak SLAs but in outcomes and results aligned directly to business metrics. Instead of annually framing projects to earmark access to tech resources, the product team is responsible for continuously assessing and refreshing its performance and priorities, with the ability to scale up or down based on justified changes to nested outcomes and expected key results. Everything will become more fluid, so finance should start putting processes and governance in place now to accommodate this volatility.⁹
• Digital foundations. Many of the investments that companies make in cloud migration, core modernization, data platforms, and other technologies form a digital foundation that benefits the entire organization. Given the business-critical nature of these investments, CIOs and CFOs should consider funding them separately from the larger IT budget. More important, they should consider not allocating costs to the business and instead providing subsidies for lines of business or departments participating in executing the vision. This can protect these funding streams from indiscriminate budget cuts or belt-tightening—and distinguish them from spending on core revitalization efforts that, while also foundational, will eventually wind down.¹⁰

IT’s call to arms

Big changes need to happen with the IT organization as well—ideally in the spirit of, if not the structure of, drastically improved alignment and collaboration with the finance organization. Areas to consider include:

• Product-focused operating model. As described above, IT organizations are moving from plan-build-run structures with associated capabilities to teams oriented around market-facing products, capabilities, and internal-facing, shared service value streams. These teams bring together disciplines across tech and business silos, typically use Agile methods and tools, and tend to inspire different mindsets while requiring different skill sets. Without trivializing the challenge in reorienting every part of IT’s portfolio along these lines, the talent realities are often the biggest hurdle. Having a vision for the future of work within the organization is needed: identifying the required skill sets, how they can be sourced (for example, reskilling existing resources or tapping new talent pools), and defining new expectations and incentives.
• Foundational “tech for tech” road map. CIOs typically have a piece of their budget earmarked for IT’s own investment in the department. Being deliberate about quantifying and explaining the nature of those investments in business terms can win over skeptics. Examples include sharing the rationale behind core modernization initiatives and showing year-to-year efficiency gains as a result of simplifying, automating, and re-platforming systems. Coupled with developing and maintaining a road map of foundational strategic tech investments, CIOs can set the stage for a much different conversation about IT investment with the CFO, CEO, and board.
• Enablement empowered. Some traditional IT roles can be bastions of change, but only with a mindset shift in purpose and remit. Procurement officers and vendor managers should move from tactical short-term measures to becoming architects of creative contracts and ecosystem partnership vehicles.

Outside-in

The digital transformation underway at many organizations requires additional sources of funding to enable the kinds of changes needed to keep disruptive competitors at bay. As part of the finance and the future of IT trend, we expect to see more CIOs, CFOs, and their respective teams explore the following:

• Vendor subsidy programs. A growing number of cloud and platform-as-a-service vendors are creating subsidy programs that offer credits, free trials, and “always free” limited usage on select products to new customers that commit to fixed-term subscriptions (usually 12 months). Though many of these programs target smaller companies, vendors are beginning to offer large enterprise-level subsidy programs with negotiable terms.
• Co-investment and industry consortia. CIOs and CFOs can explore opportunities to co-invest within industry consortia or even with competitors to develop and share the benefits of a needed technology. Companies are entering into multiparty participation contracts with fine print for who has decision rights over functionality and design, and under what circumstances ownership of the IP can be transferred, among other considerations needed for productive collaboration.
• Ecosystem investments with universities. Some organizations are working with university innovation hubs to perform research and to keep their fingers on the pulse of technology innovation. Taken a step further, CIOs could set up a co-creation deal with a university in which the CIO provides funding for university research to work on a problem set. In return, the CIO and the university will co-own the resulting IP and can sell it to other organizations.
• Carveout leasebacks. In cases where an immediate capital infusion is required, one option is to identify a set of systems or infrastructure that can be sold to a third party. The third party, in return, leases back the capabilities to the seller under a predetermined set of conditions. In this fashion, CIOs and CFOs can generate immediate capital funds to spend, while accepting ongoing opex costs for the systems, services, and infrastructure. In some cases, the realized savings can be used to jointly fund new innovation agendas and activities.

Let the funding begin

In its simplest form, the Agile software development boom is a decades-old, IT-centric construct that, after years of evolving, now offers the business and IT an opportunity to work together more effectively and efficiently. The move to DevOps has amplified the opportunity by making sure the business and the “run” and “build” houses within IT come together. Likewise, DevSecOps¹¹ enables tighter integration of yet another function. Funding the pursuit of agile opportunities has been both complex and challenging; it’s now time to bring finance squarely in the fold of tomorrow’s technology engine.

The why is simple. Funding at the speed of agile optimizes for the fast flow of safe value. In order to survive and thrive, organizations should adopt new ways of working to sense, explore, invent, and innovate. Beyond strategic positioning, it can drive material impact in the market and ultimately affect the valuation of the organization. On average, product companies have valuations that are 1x their revenue. For service companies, the average valuation is 2x their revenue. For platform companies, the average valuation is 8x the revenue they generate.¹²

Transitioning fully to a new funding model won’t happen quickly. For at least the near future, you can run both old and new funding approaches in parallel as you further refine your processes and establish governance guardrails. But ultimately, the journey can be worth it. The more you embrace tech futures, the bigger the impact your efforts can have on the way investors, customers, and your people view your organization and its future promise.

Lessons from the front lines

Constructing an agile enterprise: Nationwide Building Society takes the long view

From online banking to cashless commerce, traditional financial institutions are embracing change to survive—and Nationwide, the United Kingdom’s 130-year-old building society, is no different. Leaders wanted to deliver more value and services to Nationwide’s 15 million members to excel in an environment of digital disruption and increased regulation. In late 2018, the Society hired Patrick Eltridge¹³ as its COO, aiming to transform the way the organization works.

Before Eltridge’s arrival, IT and the digital business group had launched several Agile initiatives, and Nationwide now looked to create a more cohesive, enterprise-level approach. Eltridge set out to shift the organization’s legacy systems away from waterfall methods, which he views as promoting “the illusion that you can fix the time, scope, and cost of work and hold people accountable for immovable milestones.”

Eltridge’s charter was to introduce the agile mindset across the enterprise. He approached finance leaders soon after his arrival, looking to partner with them to evolve their traditional accounting and investment funding processes to better align with IT’s Agile approach.

Instead of trying to explain—and win buy-in for—abstract agile processes, Eltridge engaged finance leaders with three commitments: 1) The monthly expenditure rate of IT change would be known and not exceeded, 2) change priorities could be revised in less than 30 days with minimal disruption, and 3) there would be no more unplanned software write-offs—all music to any CFO’s ears. Convinced of the benefits and validated by IT’s reputation for safe and reliable delivery, finance agreed to enable Agile methods and continuous funding in the coming year.

During the funding transition, the portfolio management office—renamed the Value Realization Office—continued to use waterfall or Agile methods, depending on the project type. But when the office needed to shift investment priorities, Nationwide had not yet defined a way to objectively evaluate the relative value of inflight changes across the entire portfolio. To resolve this, Eltridge introduced the “weighted shortest job first” (WSJF) prioritization method to help the team prioritize changes based on their projected economic benefit, which is estimated by dividing “cost of delay” by job size. WSJF is not a one-and-done process—the backlog of initiatives is regularly reviewed and reprioritized.

The Value Realization Office led the exercise, inviting product owners, architects, delivery leaders, and finance to discuss and vote on change priorities across the entire portfolio. The WSJF exercise accomplished the team’s goal of rationalizing budget and investment decisions—and generated an unexpected benefit. “Senior leaders left with a deeper understanding of the portfolio and interdependencies of the work,” Eltridge says. “Prioritization was a happy byproduct.”

According to Eltridge, “I’ve seen many organizations with a bottom-up, grassroots push toward enterprise agility, but that alone is seldom sustainable. This sort of change requires senior leadership understanding, trust, and sponsorship to last over the long haul. Leaders need to experience this way of working before they can internalize and understand it.” Patience and persistence are required.

Barclays banks on agile

Size and history don’t make an organization safe from rapidly evolving competitive pressure, and banking giant Barclays is adapting by leveraging agile ways of working. Nimble fintech startups, business model-changing emerging technologies, new consumer data protection regulations, and other industry challenges led Barclays to launch an enterprisewide agile adoption initiative in 2015. Since then, more than 800 teams—including the bank’s Trade and Working Capital (T&WC) business—have adopted agile principles, values, and practices.

To better support iterative releases, continually changing requirements, cross-functional collaboration, and other hallmarks of Agile software development, Barclays retooled many planning, budgeting, and finance processes. The agile transformation changed the way business, finance, and technology functions interact, says Brijesh Ammanath, global CIO for T&WC.¹⁴

For example, Ammanath’s technology team was challenged to reconcile iterative delivery with its traditional budgeting exercise, typically conducted 18 months in advance of project delivery. Instead, the team established a rolling wave planning cycle. Technology and business functions meet quarterly to discuss and prioritize the product outcome road map and feature deliveries; technical debt also goes in the queue so that it doesn’t bog down development and testing. Other business priorities may bubble up depending on competitive pressures, regulatory changes, the emergence of new technologies, evolving operational goals, and other market trends and performance indicators.

Outcomes that aren’t driving value for the business are de-emphasized, with funding rerouted to key revenue drivers. Conversely, if a feature is increasing revenue, teams could decide to enhance it and align more of the capacity-based funding to it. Business and technology leaders are equally empowered to prioritize projects.

Finance and technology teams then meet monthly to review costs and outcomes. Instead of providing imprecise long-horizon estimates, the technology team maps investments to key business revenue drivers. The move to agile allowed T&WC to increase production delivery frequency twelve-fold, from quarterly to weekly, allowing the technology team to demonstrate tangible outcomes even if revenue is not immediately projected.

Barclays’ enterprise operating model—and the organization’s mindset—are now fully adapted to the agile life cycle. One critical success factor was intentional communication with business partners—for example, educating the finance team about one project’s cone of uncertainty helped team members understand why agile was needed and how the new delivery model worked. Radical cost transparency has helped establish trust. Finally, improving visibility into the delivery process, taking the time to understand business priorities, and consistently meeting delivery commitments have helped improve cross-functional collaboration and build trust with business stakeholders. As a result, the T&WC technology team enjoys a high level of confidence from its business and finance partners when it comes to prioritizing, delivering, and funding features and products.

“Agile has changed everything from the way we’re structured and how we hire people to the tools we use for collaboration,” Ammanath says. “It’s a continuous improvement journey, so the transformation will be ongoing. The whole purpose is to be better this week than we were last month.”

Big bang: Rolls-Royce’s bold approach to agile

For over a century, Rolls-Royce has pioneered some of the world’s most powerful and efficient engines. From its beginnings as an internal combustion engine manufacturer, the company has evolved into a leading global industrial technology-based innovator of intelligent and electrical engines, pioneering cutting-edge technologies to help the planet’s vital power needs. To facilitate continual improvement, Rolls-Royce is embracing digitalization across the enterprise to create entirely new ways of engineering, manufacturing, and serving customers.¹⁵

The transformative journey began in March 2018, when leadership restructured the company to drive more business value and improve cash flow. Rolls-Royce established several restructuring programs covering areas from culture and organizational health advancement to financial improvement and technology transformation.¹⁶ Anthony Allcock, director of IT business management and transformation,¹⁷ was charged with enabling the technology transformation by erecting a foundation to support agile ways of working across the enterprise.

Allcock realized that IT needed to lead the change to agile methods. A significant change in the IT operating model became critical to establish a foundation for transformation. By using a modern, product-oriented delivery model, they focused on delivering value more quickly across the company. If the organization tried to build a digital technology foundation using their traditional IT operating model, it would be too slow—IT would not be able to keep up with the pace of change in the business.

In the new model, IT and the business work as a team to achieve business outcomes. There’s more energy and empowerment in the organization and shared ownership of the corporate strategy. They have also been able to generate more value and improve efficiencies through simplifying and automating key processes. While there is still work to be done, the organization has achieved a 40 percent reduction in governance forms and a 60 percent reduction in management control gates.

In only eight months, Allcock and the team have made significant progress, with the organization meeting goals for releasing more value to the enterprise through agile processes. And the journey continues: The team has developed a plan for how it can shift to funding agile teams and managing investments in a way that supports Rolls-Royce’s digital transformation journey and long-term ambitions to deliver clean, safe, and competitive power solutions, while meeting financial goals.

My take

Narayanan (KK) Krishnakumar, VP and CTO, Delta Air Lines

Being agile is about developing a flexible—yet structured—approach to how the entire enterprise works together to create stakeholder value. Instead of completing predefined one-and-done projects, an organization builds and delivers products and portfolios of products to meet customer needs. It’s a cycle of continual improvement that supports learning as you go and adjusting direction as issues and opportunities arise.

Delta’s business is built on flight—one of technology’s greatest achievements. We work to provide an exceptional experience for travelers who trust us to comfortably and safely carry them on their journeys around the world. As technology continually evolves and accelerates, we are evolving with it to deliver more value to our stakeholders.

To accomplish this, we’re on a journey of our own to become more agile in everything we do. We started in IT, changing our applications and infrastructure to be more aligned with the business to enable new and better customer offerings. We jumped in, learning the mechanics of Agile, training our people, and running sprints and automated builds. Looking back, we were “doing agile,” but we weren’t yet “being agile.” Being agile extends far beyond software development—it creates more flexibility and responsiveness across the enterprise and delivers tangible value as outcome.

So we pivoted. We’re working with the business to shift our focus from projects to portfolios of products. For example, the account management portfolio includes products that enhance customer loyalty, including Delta Sky Club and Medallion status levels. And the catering operations portfolio includes new customer-focused products, such as enabling passengers to preselect their meals.

Our business team members are actively engaged in defining products within the portfolios and setting IT priorities. And in the spirit of being agile, we’ll refine these as we learn. We’re also changing how IT is funded—moving from project-based to product-based funding, with ongoing teams working in sprints to deliver a continuous stream of new and improved product features and value.

I’ve found that as companies shift from a project to a product lens, the agile mindset begins to ripple across the enterprise. At Delta, as IT becomes more agile, the business is changing too, creating new roles for product owners and managers while adapting their ways of working. Sustainable change takes time, and we’re beginning to see a shift to more agile practices across the company.

My advice to other technology executives embarking on this journey is to recognize that building an agile enterprise is more than changing software development processes—being agile requires a cultural shift, beginning at the top. We’ve been on this journey for two years, and we’re seeing results by engaging people at all levels across the organization. Patience is required. The agile journey is one that never ends—there will always be opportunities for improvement ahead.

Executive perspectives

STRATEGY

As the pressure to do more with technology increases, the business and IT can no longer remain separate operating entities. By aligning both to products or value streams, organizations can develop greater confidence in their technology investments. They can create joint outcome road maps and measure key results along the way with greater precision and accuracy. Moreover, as traditional boundaries separating the business from IT disappear, leaders are making increasingly complex technical innovation decisions. As such, organizations should work to find the right combination of CFO, CIO, or other CXOs to govern decisions. Even in organizations actively exploring new ways to fund innovation, decision rights are likely not on anyone’s agenda at present. This will change: Left unaddressed, this issue could easily become an insurmountable barrier to change.

FINANCE

Funding IT has often felt like more art than science, from estimating costs and timelines to measuring results. And it’s becoming more complex—whether dealing with the impacts of adopting enterprise agility or understanding the funding investment options from the hyperscale cloud providers. For example, responding to the pace of external disruption requires more than just a matter of transitioning from an annual to a rolling funding model. Agile requires changes to internal controls, financing mechanisms, and to established accounting and auditing processes. And notably, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams may need to develop more flexible approaches to forecasting profit and loss for income statements and to calculating operating performance. Further, depending on the magnitude of investments made in digital transformation, CFOs may have to renegotiate the way they report earnings to accommodate new FP&A approaches and open-ended investments that offer uncertain outcomes.

RISK

The same pressing need for greater enterprise agility that drives the finance and the future of IT trend also challenges chief risk officers and other leaders to reevaluate the way they understand and manage risk. Going forward, risk—like finance and other enterprise functions—should become enablers of innovation rather than impediments to it. One approach involves thinking about potential risks that could arise in a future that is largely unknown, rather than basing risk assessments on current or past activities. Consider the kinds of cyber risks that companies currently associate with technologies such as cloud, blockchain, or next-generation customer experience solutions. They often include factors like limitations on liability and identification of third-party risks. While certainly relevant, these factors apply to yesterday and today, not tomorrow. Viewing innovation through a backward-facing lens—whether for purposes of funding or assessing risk—not only places limitations on innovation’s potential but may ultimately undermine competitiveness at a time when speed-to-market is more important than ever.

Are you ready?

1. How effective is your organization’s drive toward agility? Which parts of the organization have adopted a product-focused operating model?
2. Have you moved to capacity-based funding models? With a mindset of maximizing enterprise value?
3. Which flexible approaches for funding innovation are IT and finance jointly exploring? Which creative sources of capital from outside your organization are you taking advantage of to fund key initiatives?

Learn more

1. Reinventing tech finance: Explore the impact of IT operating model changes on technology funding and budgeting.
2. Reimagining the role of technology: See how companies are creating long-term value by unifying their business and technology strategies.
3. Finance 2025: Read how CFOs are preparing the finance function—and themselves—for the digital future.

Technology

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