FinOps Implementation Requires Cross-Organizational Collaboration for Long-Term Success: New Resource From Info-Tech Research Group

The new resource from the firm underscores that maturing an organization's financial operations (FinOps) practice empowers every cloud user to maximize the value of their spend, but doing so is a shared responsibility across organizational teams and departments.

TORONTO, Sept. 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - As cloud adoption increases across all industries, so too does the complexity of cloud environments, making the management and optimization of cloud spend both a top challenge and priority for IT organizations. In response, the practice of FinOps has emerged to help organizations maximize the value they get from the cloud. As its popularity surges, organizations are bombarded with the messaging that they must engage in FinOps despite a lack of practice maturity. Info-Tech Research Group has identified that one of the biggest obstacles for IT leaders is empowering engineers and other cloud users to work with other organizational teams to meet this shared FinOps goal. To help IT navigate the obstacles, the leading global research and advisory firm has released its new industry blueprint Get Started With FinOps.

Whether organizations are at the beginning of the FinOps journey or on the path to maturing the practice, Info-Tech's blueprint has been created to support IT leaders and their organizations in their efforts to harness the power of FinOps regardless of maturity.

"To grow and mature an organization's FinOps practice, the challenge is breaking down silos, encouraging collaboration across business units, holding cloud users accountable for their cloud usage and spend, and understanding the shared goals of FinOps," says Natalie Sansone, PhD, research director of Infrastructure & Operations at Info-Tech Research Group. "Beyond finding ways to reduce cloud costs, FinOps is a cultural shift that enables better collaboration between distributed teams and allows them to leverage data to identify opportunities to maximize business value from cloud investments."

The firm's new resource explains that understanding the collaborative nature of financial operations and defining the required roles and tasks will assist organizations in implementing or improving FinOps. In turn, expected benefits include improved visibility and control over cloud spend, optimized resource allocation and reduced waste, enhanced transparency, improved forecasting and budgeting, and improved cost accountability across business units.

In the blueprint, Info-Tech highlights three steps IT leaders and departments can follow to ensure widespread understanding and collaborative ownership of FinOps across the organization. These steps are outlined below:

1.  Define FinOps roles and structure. In step one, IT personnel will identify all roles and personas that will be involved in FinOps and how the team will be structured. While FinOps is a shared responsibility, it works best when driven by a central function. Therefore, identifying a central FinOps team as well as centralized and decentralized functions and activities is a key component of maturing and growing the FinOps practice. Personas and key roles to consider include:

• Engineering and Operations
• Business and Product Owners
• IT, Apps, and FinOps Teams
• Procurement and Sourcing
• Executive Leadership
• Finance

2.  Identify FinOps activities. The second step requires the review of all domains, categories, activities, and tasks involved in FinOps before assigning responsibilities to participants. In this phase of the process, IT organizations will:

• Measure and analyze cloud usage and costs
• Budget, benchmark, and forecast cloud usage and spend
• Optimize cloud usage and cost
• Establish accountability, culture, policies, and governance
• Adopt tools and automation
• Identify and document FinOps activities

3.  Assign responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI) tasks and review results. In step three, IT leaders and their teams will use the RACI chart tool, included in the resource, to assign ownership to FinOps tasks and plan next steps for developing and maturing FinOps processes. Completion of the third phase will yield:

• A completed FinOps RACI analysis
• A thorough review and analysis of RACI and maturity results
• An opportunity to brainstorm and assign improvement ideas

Info-Tech advises that FinOps requires a cultural shift to collaboration and will not succeed if it is seen as solely one team's responsibility or if teams work in silos. While a centralized team should drive and oversee FinOps standards and best practices that enable the necessary culture of collaboration, every person who uses the cloud within the organization must understand and fulfill their defined role and responsibilities for overall success. The firm suggests that a key enabler of collaboration is creating a blameless culture in which mistakes are acknowledged, owned, and learned from.

To learn more about the benefits of implementing and maturing the FinOps practice, download the complete Get Started With FinOps blueprint.

To leverage Info-Tech's cloud resources to further inform cloud improvements and strategy, download related research below or visit the Infrastructure & Operations Resource Center:

• Define Your Cloud Vision
• Document Your Cloud Strategy
• Design Your Cloud Operations

For media inquiries on the topic or to get exclusive, timely commentary from Info-Tech analysts, please contact PR manager Sufyan Al-Hassan at [email protected]. 

For information about Info-Tech Research Group or to access the latest research, visit infotech.com and connect via LinkedIn and X.

Info-Tech Research Group is one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory firms, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals. The company produces unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. For 25 years, Info-Tech has partnered closely with IT teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

Media professionals can register for unrestricted access to research across IT, HR, and software and over 200 IT and industry analysts through the firm's Media Insiders program. To gain access, contact [email protected].

SOURCE Info-Tech Research Group