If you want to transform IT, start with finance
Oh god, no.<p>Finance itself is the worst place to get anything done, since their view is almost always a reactive one.<p>When accounting and controlling are done setting up their cost centers, the most logical place from their view would be to fire all developers and double the sales team, as that's where the money is made.<p>Risky and unproven new projects with unclear (but potentially massive) returns or indirect relations like production engineers increasing the productivity of application engineers through automation do simply not exist in that world.<p>Finance is ultimately a completely soulless place that — just like technology-centered nerds — should defer to a CEO who puts all the pieces together into a coherent vision, ruthlessly chases product-market fit and a profit-first (but NOT profit-only or self-cannibalizing) approach and thus injects business sense into all players in their company.<p>And that includes the finance department, of which I've certainly seen some of the most stupid ideas. Like software capitalization/activation that did made sense for converting opex to capex in the GAAP sheets, but in the end drove all the best engineers away because of all the mindless paperwork. Just one of many examples.<p>Finance isn't any more intelligent than the other players in the company.