Technology ROI: The CIO-CFO War Hiding Behind Collaboration
Forty-nine percent of CIOs and 39% of CFOs say defining technology ROI is contentious. That corporate-speak translates to: they’re
Forty-nine percent of CIOs and 39% of CFOs say defining technology ROI is contentious. That corporate-speak translates to: they’re fighting about it. Both claim to be in charge of technology investments – 61% of CIOs versus 59% of CFOs. Nearly one-third of CIOs call innovation budgets insufficient while a similar number of CFOs call them excessive.
Yet 92% describe their relationship as “collaborative.” This disconnect between claimed collaboration and actual conflict explains why 60% of organizations overspend cloud budgets and why C-suite confidence in IT teams keeps declining.
The technology ROI war isn’t about definitions or collaboration frameworks. It’s about power, measurement, and fundamentally different views of what technology actually delivers.
The ROI Definition Fight
CFOs want numbers. Revenue increases, cost reductions, productivity gains – preferably measured quarterly. CIOs talk about “strategic value,” “digital transformation,” and “future capabilities.” These aren’t just different languages. They’re incompatible worldviews about what technology accomplishes.
A CIO might argue that implementing a new data platform creates strategic value by enabling future AI capabilities. The CFO hears: spending millions now for undefined benefits later. When the CFO demands ROI justification, the CIO produces projections about improved decision-making, faster innovation cycles, and competitive positioning. None of this translates into the financial metrics CFOs use to evaluate investments.
The contention over technology ROI definitions isn’t academic. It determines which projects get funded, how success gets measured, and whose judgment prevails in resource allocation decisions. When 49% of CIOs consider this contentious, they’re saying nearly half the time they can’t get CFOs to accept their investment cases using their preferred metrics.
KPMG’s survey reveals priorities shifting between productivity gains and revenue growth depending on economic conditions. In January 2025, 79% of leaders prioritized productivity. By October the prior year, 51% focused on revenue gains. This instability makes technology ROI measurement even more contentious as goalposts constantly move.
Who Actually Controls Technology Spending
The survey exposes a power struggle both sides pretend doesn’t exist. Fifty-nine percent of CFOs claim primary responsibility for AI and technology investments. Sixty-one percent of CIOs claim the same authority. This isn’t healthy overlap in shared responsibility. It’s both executives believing they’re in charge while the other encroaches on their territory.
CFOs control budgets and financial governance. CIOs control technical strategy and implementation. In theory, this creates clear boundaries. In practice, every significant technology decision touches both domains, forcing collaboration that often devolves into conflict over who makes final calls.
The CFO perspective treats technology as capital allocation requiring financial justification like any investment. Build a factory or implement an ERP system – both consume capital and should deliver measurable returns. This framework demands that technology ROI be quantifiable, preferably with net present value calculations and payback periods.
CIOs resist this framework because it misunderstands how technology creates value. Building technical capabilities, maintaining security, enabling future innovations – these don’t fit neat ROI calculations but remain critical for business competitiveness. When CFOs demand financial justification for everything, CIOs feel forced to manufacture dubious quantitative cases for qualitatively important initiatives.
The Budget War
Sixty-three percent of companies dedicate over 20% of annual budgets to innovation. Nearly one-third of CIOs call this insufficient. A similar number of CFOs call it excessive. This isn’t a small disagreement about optimization. It’s fundamental conflict about whether technology investment levels are too high or too low.
From the CFO view, technology spending has exploded without commensurate benefits. Cloud costs keep rising. Every department wants new tools. CIOs request budget increases for AI, cybersecurity, modernization, and digital transformation. Meanwhile, demonstrable financial returns remain elusive. The CFO sees an organization drowning in technology spending with little to show for it.
From the CIO view, the company is starving technology investments needed to remain competitive. Competitors spend more on innovation. Legacy systems create technical debt. Security threats require constant investment. Digital transformation demands sustained funding. Budget constraints force choosing between critical priorities rather than addressing all necessary initiatives.
Neither side is wrong. Technology spending has increased dramatically while measuring its benefits remains difficult. But this creates constant tension over budget allocation that frameworks about “collaboration” don’t resolve. One executive group believes spending is too high, the other believes it’s too low – and they’re both looking at the same numbers.
Cloud Spending: The Specific Disaster
Sixty percent of organizations overspend cloud budgets due to mismatched perceptions between IT and finance. This isn’t about forecasting errors. It’s about fundamental disagreement over what constitutes appropriate cloud spending.
CIOs approve cloud resources based on technical requirements and development velocity. Engineers need compute capacity for testing. Data scientists require processing power for models. Development teams want faster deployment pipelines. From the technical perspective, these are legitimate business needs justifying cloud expenditure.
CFOs see ballooning cloud bills with unclear business justification. A $500,000 monthly AWS invoice broken into thousands of line items for services the CFO doesn’t understand. When asked to explain costs, IT teams provide technical justifications that don’t translate into financial terms. The CFO concludes the company is wasting money on unnecessary cloud resources.
The overspending happens because IT teams optimize for technical capability while finance teams optimize for cost control. These objectives conflict directly. IT wants resources available for potential needs. Finance wants payment only for actual usage. IT views cloud flexibility as valuable capability. Finance views it as budget discipline failure.
The Confidence Crisis
C-suite executives have lost confidence in IT teams. This isn’t about IT competence in technical domains. It’s about IT’s inability to communicate value in business terms, deliver projects on time and budget, and demonstrate measurable returns on technology investments.
The confidence erosion creates negative feedback. When C-suite executives don’t trust IT teams, they demand more justification, oversight, and financial controls. This bureaucracy slows technology initiatives, frustrating IT teams who see organizational competitors moving faster. The delays and added costs further erode confidence, creating more controls and less trust.
CIOs feel caught between impossible demands. Deliver transformational change while cutting costs. Move faster while adding governance. Prove ROI while investing in capabilities with long-term payoffs. The contradictions stem partly from lack of shared understanding between technology and business leadership about what technology can realistically accomplish.
Why “Collaboration” Frameworks Fail
KPMG recommends open communication, defined roles, unified vision, and common frameworks. These suggestions appear in every article about CIO-CFO relationships. They assume the problem is communication and process rather than genuine disagreement about priorities and resource allocation.
Fifty-seven percent of CFOs think collaboration significantly improves operational efficiency. Only 37% of CIOs agree. Fifty-one percent of CFOs believe collaboration enhances risk management. Just 29% of CIOs concur. These aren’t communication gaps. They’re different beliefs about what collaboration actually accomplishes.
The collaboration emphasis obscures real conflict. CFOs want technology spending controlled and justified financially. CIOs want budget flexibility and acceptance of qualitative benefits. Both claim collaboration while pursuing incompatible objectives. More meetings and frameworks don’t resolve fundamental disagreements about how much to spend on technology and how to measure its value.
The 92% claiming collaborative relationships likely reflects both social desirability bias and genuine belief that conflict is being managed acceptably. But management doesn’t equal resolution. The contentious ROI definitions, overlapping authority claims, and budget disagreements persist beneath the collaborative surface.
International Variations
The CIO-CFO dynamic plays out differently across regions. European companies typically grant CFOs more authority over technology spending, reflecting stronger financial governance traditions. Asian companies often elevate technology strategy higher in corporate hierarchies, giving CIOs more influence. American companies split authority more ambiguously, creating the power struggles KPMG documents.
Regulatory environments affect these relationships. European data privacy rules require technical expertise that empowers CIOs in compliance discussions. Asian government technology initiatives often align with corporate technology strategies, strengthening CIO positions. American technology regulation remains fragmented, providing less clarity about where authority properly resides.
Company maturity in technology adoption also affects dynamics. Technology-native companies treat technology as core business function, often eliminating traditional CIO-CFO tension by fully integrating technology into business strategy. Traditional companies digitizing existing operations face more conflict as they determine how much technology should drive versus support business objectives.
What Actually Works
Companies that resolve technology ROI conflicts successfully typically make hard choices about what technology should accomplish rather than pretending universal frameworks solve fundamental disagreements.
Some companies explicitly prioritize cost reduction and efficiency, giving CFOs authority to enforce financial discipline on technology spending. This approach sacrifices innovation velocity for budget predictability. It works when business models depend on operational efficiency rather than rapid innovation.
Other companies prioritize technology-driven growth and innovation, giving CIOs authority to invest in capabilities with long-term rather than immediate returns. This accepts higher costs and measurement ambiguity in exchange for competitive advantages from technology leadership. It works when business models depend on innovation rather than operational excellence.
The middle ground – trying to achieve both efficiency and innovation simultaneously while satisfying both CFO and CIO priorities – often produces the conflicts KPMG documents. Companies that avoid these conflicts typically make explicit strategic choices about technology’s role rather than seeking frameworks that let everyone claim victory.
The Measurement Problem Remains Unsolved
Technology ROI measurement hasn’t improved despite decades of effort. The fundamental challenge persists: technology creates both quantifiable and unquantifiable value, but financial systems demand quantification of everything.
Replacing an aging server reduces operational costs in measurable ways. Building a data platform that enables future analytics has diffuse benefits across the organization that resist clean measurement. Both investments may be equally important, but they require different justification approaches.
CFOs understandably resist accepting “strategic value” arguments without quantification because this gives CIOs blank checks. But forcing quantification of inherently qualitative benefits produces fictional ROI calculations that serve bureaucratic needs without reflecting reality. Neither approach satisfies.
Some companies experiment with portfolio approaches where technology investments get classified by type. Efficiency projects require traditional ROI justification. Platform investments require architectural justification. Innovation experiments require learning goals rather than financial returns. This recognizes different investment types deserve different measurement approaches rather than forcing everything into single frameworks.
The War Continues
The technology ROI conflict won’t be resolved through collaboration frameworks or communication improvements. It stems from genuine disagreement about technology spending levels, measurement approaches, and decision-making authority. Recognizing this conflict as legitimate rather than treating it as communication failure would improve how organizations manage these tensions.
CFOs will continue demanding financial justification for technology spending. CIOs will continue arguing for strategic investments that resist neat quantification. Both perspectives have merit. Companies that pretend collaboration eliminates these tensions deceive themselves about the real dynamics driving technology investment decisions.
The 49% of CIOs and 39% of CFOs who admit technology ROI definition is contentious are being more honest than the 92% claiming collaborative relationships. The war exists whether or not executives admit it. Better to acknowledge the conflict and manage it explicitly than maintain facades of collaboration while fighting over every significant technology investment decision.
Sources:
- KPMG: 49% of CIOs and 39% of CFOs consider technology ROI definition contentious
- KPMG: 61% of CIOs vs 59% of CFOs claim primary responsibility for AI and technology investments
- KPMG: Nearly one-third of CIOs consider innovation budgets insufficient vs CFOs deeming excessive
- KPMG: 92% describe CIO-CFO relationship as collaborative
- KPMG: 79% prioritized productivity gains in January vs 51% focused on revenue gains in October
