Training IT people on the basics of finance

Earlier today, I spoke at the CFO Magazine Technology Summit about corporate portfolio management.  It has been a great session so far and opened with a highly entertaining and engaging address by James Dallas, CIO and SVP of Medtronic.

Mr Dallas spoke about the cultural change that he is hoping to make within the IT function at Medtronic and made a few key interesting points. 

• He highlighted that IT and Finance need to partner with each other and is working actively with his finance organization to ensure this occurs.
• Interestingly, Medtronic is having all 1100 IT staffers go through a finance training put together by the finance organization (which Mr Dallas' group has partnered with on this).  The training will help the IT staff understand basics of good business case development and relevant finance concepts.  In his view (which I agree with), finance is the language that people in the organization speak and understand (e.g. revenue, profit, ROI, etc) and so instead of fighting this, he is partnering with finance to ensure his people are able to talk this language.  Bits and bytes are interesting but not what the vast majority of people understand or need to understand. 
• He also highlighted that most organizations are implementing BI, ERP, etc solutions.  And that the mere installation of such tools does not confer competitive advantage on your firm especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.  It's the culture elements and the ability to use such tools to execute better that determines and delivers competitive advantage.

It was great to hear a CIO and especially one of such a great company point to the need for IT and Finance to work together.  More than the talk, however, is the actual actions that Mr Dallas and Medtronic are taking which are worthy of praise and should be emulated in some form.  It seems Medtronic is committed to and executing upon a vision of making IT more relevant, understandable and valuable to the entire organization.