The future of FinOps and ITAM - IT Value Management?

While away at FinOps X, a lot of people asked me what I think the future is for FinOps, what a career looks like long term, how the sector may change.  I think largely they were asking this because they wanted to know what I thought on the back of my tooling research, but me being me, I gave them my full opinion on what I think may happen. Before we get into it, let’s set some context.

So firstly, why am I so interested in FinOps and ITAM (and GreenOps) and how they come together. Well my technical background comes from making online games, then moving into Architecture, Cloud Transformation Consultancy and then (because I love spreadsheets) FinOps. In all of those roles, both infrastructure and licences have been part of my day job. That may seem odd, that I consider licences to be part of my day job, but due to my architecture background where I used to price licences, people have always come to me about licences. Which in my eyes was a terrible idea, but this eventually ended up with me having M365 and Google Workspace under me while running FinOps. So I’ve been there and done it, and I realised I didn’t really have the expertise to do all those things, it’s simply too much for one person to know. So I did what any sensible person would, I surrounded myself with smarter people than me to get the job done. 

Due to the above I’ve always had a foot in all those worlds, and I keep track of the kind of roles I see coming up (and disappearing in both). While it may seem there is a huge growth in FinOps, would you believe that in the research I’m doing that I’m seeing some teams shrink? Anyone from an ITAM world has definitely seen their teams shrink and it has become harder to get new heads to replace old ones. Why? Because while we always talk about the importance of Value in FinOps, I’m not sure many organisations feel they are getting it. Is this the fault of the FinOps team? Or the ITAM team? Likely not, but it is a problem with how they are positioned (intentionally or otherwise) as cost reduction functions. So we really, desperately, for all our sakes in FinOps and ITAM, need to start getting our organisations to start thinking more about value.

Last week, people started asking me over a beer (or a lemonade as I’m off the drink) about FinOps careers and I gave a very candid view. FinOps will hit a ceiling and growth in the practice will stutter.  Why, you say? Why am I, known for positivity and passion, so negative and cynical? Well I’m a head of FinOps, in other larger organisations I’ve been a director of FinOps or what would be in some firms a VP of FinOps. So what’s my next career step? Where do you go next? Head of FinOps at a bigger place? Well eventually that well will dry up, where do you go from there? Well I’ve not really aligned myself to Operations, so while there are bigger roles in Operations, I’m not going to be seen as suitable. What about Finance, that’s part of FinOps, right? Well I’m not likely to progress in a Finance role, I’m an allied persona to them but not seen as true finance. So actually, I’ve hit a ceiling, what next? Well I don’t say this to scare you into not coming into FinOps, it’s a hugely valuable and rewarding career. My point is, make sure you keep your skills up in other areas, this will help you be better at FinOps in my view, but also give you more prospects. I think exactly the same can be said about ITAM and ITAM careers, I’d be interested if anyone disagrees.

So if there is no career path, people are likely to either sit in a role (meaning less progression for others, meaning you lose people earlier in their career journey who see no path upwards and are more able to pivot) or they jump to another career/path, meaning their skills and experience leave the market - it doesn’t move with them upwards into more senior roles like it does in finance and Ops, it leaps somewhere else. This is why I’ve been thinking about IT Value Management. I thought it was a term I came up with at FinOps X, actually it turns out I can see references back to 2003 and can be seen in TBM as well.  So why is a term that in my eye so perfectly describes the point of FinOps, not talked about? Because people still forget it’s about Value.

I often say ITAM and FinOps are a lot alike, but FinOps has far better PR. We definitely talk about value more, ITAM are almost always seen as cost reduction, rather than people thinking about the value software brings to the organisation. FinOps is often the bridge between finance and technology, well ITAM is the bridge between procurement and technology in many cases. What we’re all trying to do, whether we express it well, is make sure the company is getting the best value for money from its investments. That sounds a lot like procurement right? Well yes, but they have even worse PR than ITAM (and secretly I think they like that). We talk a lot about convergence in ITAM and FinOps, I think it scares people, but as we say at Synyega convergence is when “FinOps, GreenOps and ITAM are stronger together than alone”. It’s not about mashing teams together who do vaguely the same thing, it’s about empowering each other through experiences and collaboration to drive better outcomes. Together, we’re actually trying to deliver IT Value Management (ITVM). That’s the next step for us, a joint leadership role focused entirely on tracking and improving value. The reality to me is, does that end there with just FinOps and ITAM? Absolutely not. I’m really hopeful that organisations wake up and realise they are wasting money, and carbon, in cloud, software and other areas by not getting and analysing the right data to drive better decisions. I’m hopeful that those of us in FinOps and ITAM can help drive this change and then push up the concept of ITVM in an organisation, showing that value is key. This will help us collaborate, but it’ll also help us grow and extend outside of our singular practices and help us have a greater impact on the organisation.

So while I may seem cynical about career prospects, it’s actually that I think things are just going to change and become bigger (and hopefully better). We’ll learn that actually we can deliver more to an organisation by bringing concepts together and that will in itself drive our own career paths for us.  Either that or I’ll be out of FinOps in the next 5 years. Let’s wait and see!