> The mystery to me is why IT departments run by a CFO are notoriously bad at IT. It seems like Finance will take cutting costs over increased revenue every day

> The mystery to me is why IT departments run by a CFO are notoriously bad at IT. It seems like Finance will take cutting costs over increased revenue every day of the week; I don't know if they just hate taking on risk, or are just hoping someone will convince the board to hire a CIO and relieve them of the duties, but the end result is rarely pretty. In my experience it is simply a reflexive dismissal of externalities. If you can get them to model the small but real (though fuzzy, so with error bars) costs (eg. higher employee dissatisfaction = increased turnover, lower productivity = increased time to market, etc.) of each cut it works out better: Sometimes the cumulative price does it, sometimes the cumulative uncertainty.