📚 When Each Department Studies from a Different Textbook
Finance and Technology Need a Shared View of Cost
Many companies believe that controlling technology spending is an IT team matter. When the bill goes up, the CTO gets called, the technical team adjusts configurations, and at the next meeting the numbers line up. But the finance department still doesn't understand what generated that spending, and the business area keeps approving initiatives without knowing how much they'll cost to operate.
The problem is not that technology spending is hard to control, but that each department measures it by their own criteria and no one speaks the same language when they sit together.
FinOps, which is the discipline of managing technological value and cost jointly between engineering, finance, and business, emerges from that friction. It's not a tool or a position. It's the way each department understands what their decisions imply for the rest of the budget.
Think of a school where the math teacher, the language teacher, and the business management teacher separately define what learning well means. Each one evaluates with their own system and delivers their grade. When each department studies from a different textbook, the final exam doesn't have a single correct answer.
That same thing happens when the cloud bill arrives. IT interprets it in resources and configurations, finance interprets it in cost centers, and business doesn't know what part of the spending corresponds to its initiatives. The next meeting starts with three versions of the same number and no one knows which is official.
The FinOps Foundation describes it as the starting point of the maturity model, which measures how coordinated those three departments are in daily work. An organization in early phase reacts after spending already grew. A more advanced one incorporates cost as a criterion from the moment each initiative is approved.
In many Colombian companies that conversation never happened. Finance closes the period with its report and IT closes the period with theirs. Neither is wrong, but they're not comparable either. When each department studies from a different textbook, no one fails alone and everyone loses together when the real evaluation comes.
First verify whether your finance department can assign technology spending to the team or initiative that generated it without IT department mediation. Then gather representatives from finance, technology, and business to review the last cloud bill together. Then agree on a single criterion to interpret whether that spending was good or bad based on the results it generated. Finally measure how often those three departments make technology investment decisions together.
Do finance and technology use the same numbers when they talk about the cost of operating in the cloud in your company? 📚