A recent TBM Council session, “Elevating IT and Finance Collaboration for Strategic Success with TBM,” brought together technology and finance leaders from government and industry to unpack a familiar challenge: IT and Finance are often working toward the same goals, but through entirely different lenses.
Moderated by Neelam Saini, who leads IT Finance and the TBM Office at the County of Santa Clara, the panel featured:
- Tanya Smith, Director of Budget and Finance at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration
- Dickson Kasamale, Assistant Vice President of IT Finance and Analytics at The Standard
- Matt Zelinski, Advisor at Driver AI and former CFO of IT at organizations including McDonald’s, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Hub International
As Saini framed it at the outset, the disconnect isn’t just frustrating—it introduces real risk when technology underpins nearly every business or mission outcome.
What followed was not a theoretical discussion. It was a grounded look at how organizations are navigating trade-offs, governing new technologies like AI, and confronting the operational gaps that prevent value from being realized.
This brief captures the most important themes from that discussion—and connects them to the TBM capabilities required to act on them, with a specific focus on the TBM Outcome: Alignment—the ability to coordinate decision-making across IT, Finance, and the business using a shared understanding of cost, value, and trade-offs.
Alignment Breaks Down at the Point of Trade-Offs
One of the clearest throughlines from the session is that IT-Finance misalignment rarely stems from disagreement on goals. It breaks down when organizations are forced to make trade-off decisions.
Tanya Smith, Director of Budget and Finance at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, emphasized that IT must first understand where decisions are actually made—and how they are evaluated.
“It is important… to be able to speak the language of the business and not just the tech talk.”
That translation becomes critical when ideas move from concept to funding. Matt Zelinski, former CFO of IT at multiple global organizations, described a common dynamic: IT presents a compelling idea, receives positive feedback, and assumes alignment has been achieved.
In reality, something else has happened.
“What they’ve gotten is a reprioritization exercise… they probably haven’t received a dollar of incremental funding.”
At the executive level—particularly for the CFO of IT—every investment is evaluated relative to competing priorities. The real question is not whether an initiative is valuable, but whether it represents the best possible use of limited capital, including the option to do nothing.
This is a direct expression of the TBM Outcome: Alignment. Alignment is not achieved through better communication; it is achieved through structured trade-off decision-making that forces clarity across stakeholders.
Organizations that operate effectively in these discussions do not simply present ideas. They arrive with a full understanding of lifecycle cost, expected outcomes, and the implications of shifting investment away from other priorities. For the CFO of IT, this is the difference between participating in strategy conversations and actively shaping them.
For practitioners working to formalize this capability, Mastering the Role: CFO of IT Competencies in the Digital Era provides a detailed view of how IT Finance leaders operationalize trade-offs and translate technology decisions into financial outcomes.
Finance Cannot Be the “Office of No”—But It Must Enforce Constraints
While IT is often expected to adapt, the panel made it clear that alignment is a two-way responsibility. Smith challenged the common perception of Finance as a blocker, noting that constraints are real—particularly in environments where funding is fixed and cannot be expanded.
For the CFO of IT, this creates a dual responsibility. Finance must enforce discipline, but it must also enable the organization to invest where value is highest. That requires a deeper understanding of the technology landscape, including how vendor contracts operate, where economies of scale exist, and how investments impact the organization beyond a single function or business unit.
This is another practical expression of the TBM Outcome: Alignment, where financial constraints and technology decisions are evaluated within a shared structure. Rather than operating as a gatekeeper, Finance becomes a partner in optimizing value across the enterprise.
TBM enables this shift by connecting vendor spend to services and outcomes, exposing duplication across contracts, and supporting prioritization at an enterprise level rather than within isolated silos. For organizations establishing this foundation, TBM First Steps Guide: Building Strategic Alignment Between IT and Finance outlines how to build the shared language and structures required for effective IT-Finance partnership.
The Demand Problem Becomes Visible When It’s Centralized
A turning point in the discussion came when Dickson Kasamale described the impact of consolidating demand across the enterprise.
“Leadership teams gathered… looked at all demand in one room… and the enormity of what people are asking versus limited capacity became very clear.”
What emerges from that visibility is not just better awareness, but a fundamentally different type of conversation. When demand is centralized, the organization can no longer evaluate requests in isolation. Every new initiative is immediately understood in the context of competing priorities and finite delivery capacity.
For the CFO of IT, this is where alignment becomes actionable. Trade-offs are no longer implicit; they are visible, structured, and unavoidable. The organization is forced to decide not just what to fund, but what to defer, delay, or eliminate.
This capability depends on more than governance. It requires a shared model that allows demand to be categorized consistently, linked to cost and resource consumption, and made visible across IT, Finance, and business stakeholders. Without that structure, prioritization remains fragmented and reactive, and alignment remains an aspiration rather than a capability.
The Biggest Blind Spot: Value Realization After Go-Live
Across multiple panelists, one issue surfaced repeatedly: organizations invest heavily in building business cases, but rarely measure whether those investments delivered the expected outcomes.
Kasamale described the pattern clearly.
“Many organizations approve business cases, but don’t measure whether outcomes were delivered… because we’re too busy doing everything else.”
Zelinski explained why this breakdown is so common. Even when a strong business case is developed, the assumptions that define value often fail to carry through into contracts and execution. Sourcing teams may not fully incorporate the required performance levers into vendor agreements, and execution teams may lack the ability to measure or report on the outcomes that were originally defined.
For the CFO of IT, this represents a failure of alignment across the investment lifecycle. The organization agrees on expected value at the outset but loses the ability to validate it over time.
This is where the TBM Outcome: Alignment extends beyond planning into continuous value management. A mature TBM practice ensures that investment intent remains connected to execution reality by maintaining traceability between spend, consumption, performance, and outcomes. It enables organizations to revisit investments, assess performance, and adjust course based on actual results rather than assumptions.
The challenges described by the panel are explored in The Value of Technology— Signed, Tracked, & Delivered, which provides a framework for ensuring that value is not just defined at approval but measured and realized throughout the lifecycle.
AI Is Not Just a New Cost—It’s a Stress Test of Alignment
AI was discussed not as a standalone innovation topic, but as a stress test of IT-Finance alignment. Kasamale described AI as fundamentally changing how organizations operate and scale, moving beyond incremental productivity gains into structural transformation.
With that shift comes a heightened need for discipline. Organizations must prioritize use cases carefully, adopt incremental funding models, and maintain visibility into both cost and downstream impact.
“The need for discipline more than enthusiasm is clear.”
For the CFO of IT, AI introduces a new layer of complexity. Costs are often consumption-based and variable, value realization timelines are uncertain, and ownership frequently spans multiple teams. These characteristics make it significantly more difficult to maintain alignment without a strong underlying model.
To achieve this necessary transparency, mature organizations leverage the TBM Taxonomy v5.0. This standard provides the specific classifications needed to map complex, variable AI components—such as token consumption, GPU infrastructure, and subscription fees—into unified financial visibility.
This reinforces the importance of the TBM Outcome: Alignment, which ensures that cost structures, operational ownership, and value measurement remain connected even as complexity increases. AI does not require a new discipline—it requires the extension of TBM capabilities already established for cloud and digital investment.
To operationalize this, TBM for AI Value Realization: A Guide to Optimizing AI Investments by Aligning Business Fundamentals for Maximum Value and ROI provides guidance on structuring and measuring AI investments. When those investments fail to meet expectations, When AI Doesn’t Deliver – Using TBM to Guide AI Rationalization outlines how organizations can apply disciplined governance to adjust course.
The Metrics That Actually Matter at the CFO Level
The session concluded with a clear articulation of how technology investment is evaluated at the executive level. Kasamale emphasized metrics that connect spend to value, including investment aligned to products and value streams, unit cost trends over time, and the balance between maintaining existing capabilities and funding transformation.
Zelinski reinforced these perspectives, highlighting the importance of measuring business value per dollar, maintaining forecast accuracy, and ensuring spend predictability. He also pointed to vendor concentration as a signal of whether sourcing and technology strategies are truly aligned.
For the CFO of IT, these metrics represent the outcome of alignment rather than its inputs. They reflect whether the organization has successfully connected financial performance, operational execution, and business value.
This shift toward outcome-based measurement is a defining characteristic of mature TBM practices. For organizations looking to benchmark their progress, State of TBM 2025 highlights how leading organizations are evolving their measurement frameworks to support more effective decision-making.
Closing Perspective
This session reinforced a critical truth: IT-Finance alignment is not achieved only through communication—it is achieved through shared structures for decision-making.
For the CFO of IT, alignment is the capability to evaluate trade-offs, enforce discipline, and connect investment to outcomes. Organizations that build this capability do not eliminate tension between stakeholders; they make that tension productive.
In an environment shaped by AI, cloud economics, and continuous digital investment, that capability is no longer optional—it is foundational.
