UK CFOs and CIOs are talking more than ever — but still missing results. Discover why governance, not communication, holds the key to aligning technology delivery with business outcomes, and how IT PMaaS bridges the gap.
There’s a paradox at the heart of UK enterprise IT: C-suite relationships are strengthening, yet CFO satisfaction with technology outcomes remains stubbornly low.
According to a UK C-suite survey, 83% of UK CFOs and CIOs say their relationship has strengthened over the past year. And yet, when those same CFOs are asked whether they’re happy with the impact that technology is having on their business, only 17% say yes.
The missing piece isn’t a better tool or a bigger budget. It’s governance.
THE PARADOX NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT
More collaboration, stronger bonds, more budget, and a satisfaction rate that most businesses would find unacceptable on a customer survey, let alone an internal one.
This isn’t just stats in a research document; we see it played out in real time, in real life.
So, what’s going wrong?
The answer, when you dig into the data from Rimini Street’s UK C-suite survey, isn’t about the technology. It isn’t really about the people either. It’s about what happens, or more accurately, what doesn’t happen, in the space between a CFO’s expectation and a CIO’s delivery.
I call it the translation gap.
And it’s costing UK enterprises more than they realise.
TWO LEADERS, TWO LANGUAGES
The research paints a picture that will feel familiar to anyone who’s sat in a leadership team meeting. CFOs and CIOs are talking to each other more than ever. They’re collaborating on decisions faster. They’ve recognised — correctly — that technology and finance are no longer separate conversations.
But here’s the friction: 79% of CFOs think CIOs need to be more business-savvy to improve communication. Meanwhile, 82% of CIOs believe CFOs need to become more tech-savvy. Both sides think the other is the problem.
The reality is that both are right, and neither is the root cause. The issue isn’t a knowledge gap on either side. It’s a structural one. There is no shared language built into the project delivery process itself, no consistent mechanism for translating a CFO’s business outcome into a CIO’s delivery roadmap and then tracking that translation all the way to completion.
When that mechanism is missing:
Projects drift.
Milestones get measured in technical outputs rather than business results.
Finance leaders disengage.
Expectations and reality quietly diverge, until someone notices the 17% figure and asks what went wrong.
WHAT THE TRANSLATION GAP ACTUALLY COSTS
The survey shows that UK CFOs have a clear set of priorities they want CIOs to focus on: revenue-generating initiatives (25%), security and privacy (24%), and cost-cutting operational projects (22%).
Clear, measurable, commercial.
Now ask yourself: how many IT projects at your organisation are formally tracked against these metrics from day one?
How many project status updates include a line on revenue impact, or a running total of operational cost reduction?
How many board-level reports connect technical delivery progress to the CFO’s priority stack?
In most enterprises, the honest answer is: not many.
Projects get tracked against scope, schedule and budget, the classic triple constraint. The thing is, the CFO doesn’t primarily care about scope, schedule and budget. They care about whether the investment is moving the needle on outcomes that matter to the business.
That mismatch is what drives the 17% satisfaction figure. It’s not that the technology fails. It’s that the project was never properly anchored to the right outcomes to begin with, and nobody was consistently translating between the two worlds throughout delivery.
A GOVERNANCE PROBLEM, NOT A PEOPLE PROBLEM
It’s tempting to conclude that the solution is better communication training, or more cross-functional workshops, or simply asking CIOs and CFOs to spend more time together. The data even seems to suggest that: 43% point to the pressure of making fast, collaborative technology calls as the main driver behind the improved relationship.
However, collaboration frequency isn’t the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is that as IT budgets grow and CFOs take on greater ownership of technology decisions (65% of UK CFOs now say they’re responsible for underlying tech decisions, compared to 63% of CIOs), the same project governance structures that worked when finance and technology were separate conversations are being asked to serve both worlds at once.
They weren’t built for that. And they’re showing the strain.
Of course, neither role was originally designed to own the intersection of financial accountability and technical delivery:
The CFO thinks in business cases, ROI and risk-adjustments.
The CIO thinks in architectures, integrations and delivery sprints.
Both perspectives are valid and necessary, but they need a bridge between them, one that speaks both languages fluently and maintains that translation throughout the entire project lifecycle.
That’s not a personality trait you can necessarily hire for. It’s more a function, and increasingly, it’s a function that organisations are recognising they need.
WHERE IT PMAAS CHANGES THE EQUATION
IT Project Management as a Service does something deceptively simple: it places structured, experienced project governance at the intersection of the CFO’s world and the CIO’s world.
And keeps it there, consistently, for the duration of every engagement.
That means projects are framed in commercial outcomes from the very first conversation, not retro-fitted with financial metrics after the project goes live. It means stakeholder reporting is calibrated to what finance leaders actually need to see, not just RAG statuses and technical milestones, but progress against revenue targets, improvements to security and data protection, and measurable cost savings to date.
It means that when market conditions shift, and the survey is clear that 33% of UK enterprises currently lack contingency plans for exactly that scenario, there’s a governance layer with the flexibility and expertise to adapt quickly, without the organisation having to scramble for permanent resource it may not need long-term.Critically, it also means the CIO gets to lead delivery with greater business clarity, and the CFO gets the visibility and accountability they’re currently not getting from the 83% of partnerships that are, by all accounts, supposed to be working well.
And because PMaaS scales up or down with demand, it suits the pragmatic, incremental approach most UK enterprises are actually taking right now.
THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING
If your CFO and CIO are collaborating more than ever, but satisfaction with tech outcomes is still sitting at 17%, what would it actually take to close that gap?
The answer probably isn’t another strategy session or a new communication framework. It’s a structural change to how projects are governed from day one: anchored to commercial outcomes, translated consistently across both worlds, and accountable to the metrics that matter to the business.
That’s what we do.
That’s the structural change that closes the gap.
To explore how IT PMaaS can align delivery to business outcomes in your organisation, understand what IT PMaaS looks like in practice, and how it eases the specific pressures your CFO and CIO are navigating right now – get in touch.
More about Project Management as a Service from Stoneseed
SOURCE
This article draws on findings from Rimini Street’s UK C-suite survey, conducted by Censuswide across 250+ UK CFOs and CIOs. Full report available at: https://www.riministreet.com/resources/research-report/evolving-it-and-enterprise-investments-uk/