CFOs have a big responsibility within in an enterprise – they are responsible for the tracking of enterprise assets and liabilities, income and expenses, profits and losses,  not to mention risks. IT assets and operations impact all these elements – often disproportionately, and in unplanned ways. Hence CFOs have a special 'attachment' to IT budgets and spend a lot of time tracking them!

IT assets possibly have the fastest 'real' depreciation compared to most other assets. They get obsolete very fast, and replacements come with better performance at lower costs, at a rapid pace, resulting in rapid erosion of 'value' of any IT asset. CFO's have to worry about ensuring that the enterprise does not collect assets to fill a future museum – only such assets that the company really needs for today's use and those that are likely to give a fast and definite ROI need be bought. When an enterprise acquires an IT asset, the asset comes with a long tail – the future maintenance and operations expenses. Unless we spend on maintenance in the form of AMC or upgrade contracts, the value of the IT assets drops rapidly. So the CFO is concerned about the TCO during the lifetime of the asset and not just the capital cost.

IT operations have the potential to create large unexpected risks and liabilities to the company – You could run into a huge unexpected telephone or data bills due to genuine use, or otherwise. Your IT staff could be installing expensive software or they may be installing pirated versions of some software, the latter creating potentially large compliance risks that could wipe out most of the profits of the company.

The telecom department could be violating legal requirements that comes attachment. First item on the list is telecom – every CFO knows the telecom rates have been dropping over years and would like to prune the telecom budgets to take advantage of this dropping tariff. The next item is AMC. AMC keeps going up for obsolete hardware and it makes economical sense to get replacement hardware at much lower cost with 3 to 5 years warranty.

As a rule, several capex investments have the potential to save a large opex, and every opex item needs to be scrutinised to see if replacement by an up to date capex item would lead to significant reduction in maintenance and operations costs.

IT has played a big role in cost reduction and performance enhancement; but, at the same time, every CFO wants to ensure that every new technology investment fits within the the company's budget plans and that the company's profits are not eroded. Thus the need for every IT expense to pass the CFO's close scrutiny.