Helping CIOs speak in terms CFOs understand

The kit begins with a survey to help companies determine where they stand and what measures they must take to bring value into their organization. The Value Model is based on two main problems that Deloitte saw in the market, said Brent Wortman, Deloitte partner and value initiative co-leader.“There’s a pretty big disconnect between alignment of what people have as business strategy and what they actually do when you look at where they spend their project dollars,” Wortman said, adding IT would be a large part of that. “The second piece that we found was the knowing-doing gap.”
For example, executives might say, “I know about shareholder value and I know what’s important to our company in terms of creating shareholder value.” However, what they would do in terms of practices and the way they executed things wasn’t necessarily consistent with that, said Wortman, one of the book’s principal authors.
Similarly, in trying to align strategy with project dollars Deloitte found that the big disconnect for organizations was IT.
“CIOs are trying to demonstrate and communicate with other parts of the organization like CFOs and CEOs about how their investments are actually creating value for the organization,” said Wortman. Deloitte also found the same problem in human resources, in that the language they speak isn’t consistent with the language that CEOs or CFOs speak, he added.
To help financial execs “get it,” the book features an enterprise value map or flow chart built on an economic model. If a company improves in an area like IT, telecom and networking, for example, it looks at how that works its way up in terms of shareholder value.