4 tech pros on managing IT budgets

Business leaders are pressuring IT organizations to help streamline operations, increase productivity and enhance customer experiences. The challenge for CIOs: keep costs in check throughout the process.

From cloud to AI and cybersecurity, technology chiefs must strike a delicate balance of enabling powerful technologies without breaking the bank. They must invest with care but avoid falling behind on innovation. 

To maintain healthy levels of IT spending, CIOs and other technology chiefs must learn to quickly identify winning use cases, increase visibility over IT costs across the organization and leverage automation to stave off runaway cloud bills.

Here are four tips from technology executives for keeping IT budgets in line.

(Comments below were lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Feroz Merchhiya, CIO at the City of Santa Monica

We need to be realistic in looking at what our needs are and not get enamored by new, shiny things. Look at the assets that you have available, see what they deliver for you, and then identify the real gaps. 

As technologists, we do get attracted by new and emerging technology. While there’s nothing wrong in leveraging those, you have to have a defined use case.

Dan Priest, chief AI officer at PwC, US

One pitfall is to seed the teams with investment funds to go experiment with, but not monitor and manage the ROI. You want to be able to trace the wins back to specific AI investments.  

You also want to understand where you’re not winning, and where you need to make some adjustments to your investment strategy, your build approach or your innovation strategy.

Jenny Lin, global chief architect at Broadridge Financial Solutions

Automate everything. Automate settings and create the right guardrails, through alerts and through data transparency, so that decision makers across business and tech can actually make a conscious decision. 

Automating the base case is what we really focused on, leveraging FinOps best practices and putting the people and processes around them.

Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester

One low-hanging fruit is setting up cloud cost reports that go out weekly to different executives or personas. It’s not turnkey, necessarily: You still have to leverage the tools that you’ve provided or whatever you decide to build. That’s one of the challenges of FinOps: getting everyone involved. 

Part of the question is: how often are your CIO and CFO involved in these conversations, and how much visibility do they have?