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Using FinOps to Elevate IT in the Age of AI

Bill Lobig
Bill Lobig is VP of Apptio / IBM IT Automation
IBM

From hardware and software investments, to the cost of supporting critical talent, IT spending is ubiquitous across industries, sectors and geographies. Worldwide, IT spending is projected to exceed five trillion this year – nearly an increase of 8% from 2023. Simply put, IT is a reality within any given organization.

However, your IT investments can be negatively impacted by high operational expenses and back-office inefficiencies, which, for some organizations, can cost up to 30% of their annual revenue. With business leadership keeping a close eye on budgets, every penny matters — and that's where FinOps can help keep IT spending in check while still allowing for innovation and investment.

Adapting to Today's Cost of Business

When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster. The number of companies investing $10 million+ in AI is expected to double over the next year and cloud spend is poised for takeoff. Due to these increases, it will be critical for organizations to get their IT house in order now before new investments add chaos — and higher costs — to the mix.

FinOps Provides an Opportunity for IT to Show Value — Not Just Tell

When incorporating FinOps into an organization from both a technology and a culture perspective, organizations can reduce cloud costs by as much as 30%. This leaves ample room to reallocate funds and energy into new investments, provide more accurate forecasting, create more efficient workload planning, so IT teams can focus on innovating and creating new value rather than just managing existing applications and being burdened with day-to-day tactics.

How does this work?

According to the FinOps Foundation, organizations that have a mature FinOps posture can more effectively leverage automation, appropriately allocate their spend to the areas of the business that need it most and set very high KPIs to address the most difficult of use cases. With FinOps — in real time — the IT business can provide critical insights, information and recommendations to inform increasingly important spending decisions.

Connecting the Dots — from CFO to Developer

When discussing IT spend, the most commonly considered stakeholder in charge tends to be the CFO, the CEO or another revenue and business-centric leader. However, a FinOps framework creates a holistic and non-hierarchical platform across levels, functions and responsibilities encouraging collaboration and mutual understanding between finance and IT teams.

In today's enterprise, a developer can use company resources to modernize a company's application, an IT manager can leverage resources to provision onboard new employees, and a CIO can employ resources to invest in a new AI tool — all simultaneously. However, without an element of communication or strategy, these three roles will effectively cancel out the benefits of the others.

FinOps enables professionals at all levels of the organization to have equal visibility into overall IT spend. This common language allows leaders to make informed financial decisions at the individual level like never before.

Bill Lobig is VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

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Using FinOps to Elevate IT in the Age of AI

Bill Lobig
Bill Lobig is VP of Apptio / IBM IT Automation
IBM

From hardware and software investments, to the cost of supporting critical talent, IT spending is ubiquitous across industries, sectors and geographies. Worldwide, IT spending is projected to exceed five trillion this year – nearly an increase of 8% from 2023. Simply put, IT is a reality within any given organization.

However, your IT investments can be negatively impacted by high operational expenses and back-office inefficiencies, which, for some organizations, can cost up to 30% of their annual revenue. With business leadership keeping a close eye on budgets, every penny matters — and that's where FinOps can help keep IT spending in check while still allowing for innovation and investment.

Adapting to Today's Cost of Business

When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster. The number of companies investing $10 million+ in AI is expected to double over the next year and cloud spend is poised for takeoff. Due to these increases, it will be critical for organizations to get their IT house in order now before new investments add chaos — and higher costs — to the mix.

FinOps Provides an Opportunity for IT to Show Value — Not Just Tell

When incorporating FinOps into an organization from both a technology and a culture perspective, organizations can reduce cloud costs by as much as 30%. This leaves ample room to reallocate funds and energy into new investments, provide more accurate forecasting, create more efficient workload planning, so IT teams can focus on innovating and creating new value rather than just managing existing applications and being burdened with day-to-day tactics.

How does this work?

According to the FinOps Foundation, organizations that have a mature FinOps posture can more effectively leverage automation, appropriately allocate their spend to the areas of the business that need it most and set very high KPIs to address the most difficult of use cases. With FinOps — in real time — the IT business can provide critical insights, information and recommendations to inform increasingly important spending decisions.

Connecting the Dots — from CFO to Developer

When discussing IT spend, the most commonly considered stakeholder in charge tends to be the CFO, the CEO or another revenue and business-centric leader. However, a FinOps framework creates a holistic and non-hierarchical platform across levels, functions and responsibilities encouraging collaboration and mutual understanding between finance and IT teams.

In today's enterprise, a developer can use company resources to modernize a company's application, an IT manager can leverage resources to provision onboard new employees, and a CIO can employ resources to invest in a new AI tool — all simultaneously. However, without an element of communication or strategy, these three roles will effectively cancel out the benefits of the others.

FinOps enables professionals at all levels of the organization to have equal visibility into overall IT spend. This common language allows leaders to make informed financial decisions at the individual level like never before.

Bill Lobig is VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...