Finance & IT Couples Therapy Guideline #4: Decrease Emotional Avoidance
Author: Chuck Czajkowski | 5 min read | August 1, 2019
If you’ve been following Datavail’s blog lately, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been writing posts about our recent webinar “Couples Therapy: Getting Finance & IT To Play Nice,” (If you haven’t noticed, you can check it out right now to get up to speed.)
Although finance and IT are interdependent, this need for each other also causes friction due to the lack of a common language. Our proposal is to apply standard techniques for couples therapy – such as changing your perspective on the relationship and improving communication – to the relationship between the finance and IT teams as well.
This is the penultimate blog post in our five-part series about how to improve relations between finance and IT. On the table for today: decreasing emotional avoidance. So what exactly does that mean when applied to the finance-IT gap?
Objective vs. Subjective
The (totally fictional) conversation below is an example of dysfunctional finance-IT communication:
Finance: I keep asking you to reload the data, but you haven’t done it.
IT: You asked me that 7 and a half minutes ago.
Finance: This is a severity 1 ticket. What else could you be doing right now?
IT: You know, easy mac takes at least 5 minutes… and that’s if no one else is using the microwave.
Finance: This is why we can’t rely on IT… even at year-end close…
IT: Sounds like someone is hangry.
This dialogue shows the importance of sticking to the objective facts when it comes to getting what you need, rather than your subjective opinion. Finance employees can talk all they want about how they need better performance from their IT resources. However, the most effective argument they can make from an IT perspective is to come prepared with hard statistics showing how the performance issues are negatively impacting the bottom line.
Whose Facts Are Right?
Of course, both finance and IT may have different facts to back up their side of the story. What’s more, the same fact can be interpreted in different ways depending on who’s looking at it.
Just because the facts on both sides don’t align doesn’t mean that one side is completely right and the other is entirely wrong. Instead, it’s a sign that some collaboration is necessary in order to bridge the gap and get everyone on the same page.
Technology like Datavail’s Accelatis software, which increases visibility into your IT environment, will be crucial here. Management dashboards that are accessible to both finance and IT can help publicize important information. For example, if IT will be applying a patch at midnight tonight, finance can see this before it happens and take steps to plan around it, rather than getting frustrated by the unexpected interruption.
Accelatis is chock-full of features for Oracle Hyperion that can improve relations between finance and IT. Accelatis includes capabilities for Hyperion dashboards and reporting, as well as audit and compliance tracking in order to monitor changes to files and system settings that may have unexpected consequences.
Conclusion
Our fifth and final blog post in the coming days will discuss how you can move on from the cycle of dysfunctional behavior and promote the strengths of each side. Want to follow the full five-step series from the beginning? You can watch Datavail’s complete webinar “Couples Therapy: Getting Finance & IT To Play Nice” now.
