I enjoyed Mary Pratt’s recent ComputerWorld article on working with CFOs.

Her observation that “Most CFOs still see IT as a black box” and “have limited visibility into the value that IT creates for their organizations” rang true. It’s simply put, but is one of the reasons for the incredible growth of our IT Financial Management business. Our solutions are built to solve this exact problem, and as a side benefit it means we typically get CFO approvals very quickly.

Here are a few things we’ve learned while working with CFOs:

1. Expect skepticism. You don’t become a CFO by believing every ROI analysis that is presented to you. Every CFO has their story of being burnt by a major IT purchase that went very wrong. They’ve learned that it is their job to ask the difficult questions. Expect it and be ready to answer these questions with detailed information that shows your plan is based on facts and informed analysis. Which leads me to my next point…

2. Detail is good. Anyone with a financial background knows that you can hide big problems in summary statements. If you can’t produce detail, don’t expect to have your project approved. CFOs like access to details. They want to see that you know your stuff and have accounted for all costs. The most-used Digital Fuel feature is the dashboards that present summaries, but then let you immediately drill down to understand all underlying cost drivers. Just between us, many CFOs don’t personally look at every little detail, but having easy access to the information gives them confidence that the homework has been done.

3. Avoid technology jargon. While the CFO needs details about business value and ROI, she does not need to understand every feature and function of every product. “Increase number of transactions processed by leveraging the API” or “Capture all data into a central repository” doesn’t mean anything to a CFO. Take the language up a level and talk about “Sales agents can process twice as many orders per hour,” or “We get early visibility into changes in buying trends that allow us to take this action” instead.

By making a few simple changes to your pitches, and highlighting the business value that technology creates, you can get the CFO’s approval for more projects. If you can learn to communicate with the CFO in business terms with in-depth financial detail, you’ll be surprised at how easy it can be to get her approval.