Benchmarking, Budgeting & FinOps - The New Playbook for CIOs
Budgets alone don't tell the full story. A budget might say you're spending $200M on IT — but is that efficient? Are you investing in the right products? How do you compare yourself to peers?
That's why Gartner highlights benchmarking, budgeting, and FinOps/product funding as critical ITFM fundamentals.
Benchmarking - Competing with Data, Not Guesswork
Benchmarking ties costs to units that matter:
- Cost per user for collaboration tools.
- Cost per application maintained.
- Cost per VM per hour.
When CIOs compare these metrics to industry benchmarks, inefficiencies come into focus. Maybe storage costs are 15% above peers. Maybe application maintenance consumes more than innovation.
Budgeting - Moving from Annual to Continuous
Traditional budgeting is static, locked once a year. Modern ITFM embraces continuous forecasting. CIOs can reallocate spend as business priorities shift, making IT a driver of agility.
FinOps & Product Funding - Linking Spend to Innovation
Cloud and SaaS have redefined IT economics. Enter FinOps: embedding cost awareness into engineering and product teams. It's not just Finance watching costs — developers, product owners, and IT leaders all co-own optimization.
Product funding is the natural extension: instead of funding one-off projects, enterprises fund products and services continuously. This aligns spend with business strategy and accelerates delivery.
CIO-CFO-CPO Co-Leadership
This shift requires collaboration. CIOs, CFOs, and CPOs (Chief Product Officers) share dashboards, OKRs, and renewal playbooks. IT spend becomes a portfolio of investments, not a sunk cost.
Altios ITFM delivers real-time benchmarking dashboards, integrates FinOps practices, and enables agile budget reviews. CIOs can show the board how spend aligns directly to business outcomes.
This is the new playbook: benchmark relentlessly, budget continuously, and fund innovation at the product level.