CTO vs CFO: why your organization is still operating without business IT alignment
In this article
By now, we have all heard the AI story a million times. Yes, it will disrupt markets. Yes, it already is creating amazing growth opportunities for companies. And no, it is not a silver bullet that will solve all our problems.
Here’s the thing: if the leadership in your organization didn’t have a clear view of the software landscape before AI, they’re facing many new challenges now that AI is part of that landscape.
AI doesn’t just add opportunity. It also increases complexity, risk, and new investment needs that are hard to quantify.
There is a real boardroom gap between AI ambition and reality, and if you want to read more about it, Software Improvement Group recently published a great and insightful report on that exact topic.
What I want to discuss is a topic that has become more important than ever due to AI: my long-standing concern with the software engineering field. Software is fundamental to how we operate our organizations, yet we have never held our CTOs to the same standards of visibility and control that we expect from our CFOs.
There, I said it.
But don’t start blaming your CTO just yet; the real issue might be the system around them.
So, let’s talk about it.
The CFO test and the CTO down the hall
In about 9 out of 10 organizations I visit, the CTO cannot answer three basic questions about the software landscape that any CFO could answer if it were about finance.
Don’t believe me?
Go to the floor in your company where the C-level sits, walk over to the CFO’s office and ask the following three questions:
- Do you know exactly how much money we have?
- Do you know exactly where this money is?
- Can you tell me how much room we have to invest?
Granted, you might need to be the CEO or a board member to hear the actual numbers, but the CFO will know them.
Now walk over to your CTO. If at this point you need to go to a different floor or are redirected to the basement where the IT department lives, that is already saying a lot.
When you find the CTO, ask a similar set of three questions, but translated to technology:
- Do you know exactly how much software we have?
- Do you know exactly where it is located across our portfolio and what technologies we run?
- Do you know how much innovation capacity we have to invest?
In most organizations I visit, the answers are hesitant at best. Don’t get me wrong, the CTO will know a lot about key systems and big initiatives, but having a precise, up-to-date view of all software and the real room for innovation is rare.
And again, that’s not because the CTO doesn’t care, or doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s because the system around them was never built to give them these answers.
A shared problem, not a CTO problem
If we’re honest, we’ve treated Finance and IT very differently over the past decades.
In Finance, we’ve spent years building clear standards, roles, and responsibilities. We’ve agreed on definitions, built reporting cycles, and created a common language that everyone understands.
Financial transparency is expected.
In IT, we added systems “on the go”. We treated technology as a cost to be managed, and we let technical jargon dominate the conversation so that the leadership that is not well-versed in technicalities loses interest as soon as the CTO mentions something like source code, refactoring, or tech debt.
We can’t expect CTOs to explain this ever-growing complexity in two languages at once: deeply technical for architects and engineers, and fully business-oriented for executives who care about revenue, risk, and time-to-market.
The reality is that many organizations lack a clear, shared view of their technology. They don’t really understand their true IT investment needs, and they struggle to connect technical choices to financial and operational impact. And in the era of AI this means 88% has adopted AI, yet about two-thirds of enterprise organizations remain stuck in AI pilot mode.
AI is raising the stakes on an old weakness
None of this is entirely new. Outages, high costs, and failed modernization efforts have been around for a long time. The difference now is the context in which all of this is happening.
If you don’t know where your critical systems are, how they’re built, and how secure they are, it becomes very hard to answer straightforward AI questions at the board level, such as: Where are we already using AI? What risks does that introduce? What investment do we need to safely scale it?
This still isn’t a “do better” message for CTOs. It’s a signal that we’ve given them board-level responsibility without board-level instruments.
The need for continuous software portfolio governance
So what would “CFO-level” look like for technology?
In Finance, continuous oversight is normal. Positions, exposures, cash flow, and runway are monitored as a matter of routine. The dashboards are clear, and the guardrails are agreed.
In technology, we need the equivalent: continuous governance of the entire software portfolio. Not a one-off inventory, but an ongoing, shared picture of your all software and AI initiatives – what you have, where it lives, how it’s connected, and how it affects risk, cost, and your ability to move fast.
That is the level of visibility your CTO needs if you want them to run technology with the same rigor your CFO applies to capital.
And it’s the level of visibility you should expect as a business leader.
Where business leaders can start
You don’t need a massive transformation program to move in this direction. A few concrete steps already help change the conversation.
Start by asking the three questions – the CFO version and the CTO version – and simply listen for the gaps. Treat it as a joint discovery, not a test.
Then make it clear that better visibility is a shared outcome, not a personal expectation. “CFO-level insight into our software portfolio” should be a goal for business and IT together, not a burden the CTO has to solve alone on the side.
Finally, insist on a shared language. Ask technology teams to explain their findings in terms of business impact: where software and AI are accelerating growth, where they’re slowing you down, and what investment will change that.
If that sounds easier said than done, feel free to reach out, we might be able to help!
About the author
Wouter Knigge
Wouter Knigge is Director Solutions & Advisory at Software Improvement Group (SIG),