Should CIOs report to CFOs?

“In the early days of my career when working with entrepreneurs and innovators, I didn’t want them to look at me as just a numbers-based CFO. I wanted to align with their thinking and the cool ways in which they use their technology,” Madhu Ranganathan, EVP and CFO at OpenText, told me.  

Ranganathan’s resume includes a deep operational focus in software, hardware, and tech-enabled services, along with leading business transformation for more than 25 years. She began her leadership position at OpenText in 2018 and is based in the San Mateo, California office. Ranganathan grew up in Chennai in South India, and was encouraged to pursue finance by her mother, as well as two grandparents who “were both absolute financial nerds,” she says.

Courtesy of OpenText

The information management software company, which was founded in 1991 and is headquartered in Canada, trades under the ticker OTEX. Its annual revenue was $3.15 billion last year. The company has about 15,000 employees and operates in more than 50 countries. OpenText software products address information management across company departments. For example, keeping track of large volumes of data, compliance with regulatory requirements, and mobile and online experience at a company can be managed through OpenText’s data integration tools.

Ranganathan’s sweet spot? ERP or enterprise resource planning. “The ERP is really like the backbone of companies,” she says. OpenText’s services manage the data within an ERP. “We offer document control, document management and compliance services, and connectivity of the network,” she says. “There’s a lot we can do in and around the ERP [in the] digital and automation journeys that many companies are taking.”

But the first step for any digital transformation is aligning with the company’s strategy, Ranganathan advises. Strategies could be cost reduction, data cleanup, and data augmentation, Ranganathan says. And once the plans for any strategy are in place, all roads lead to the CFO’s office.  

That’s led to a close relationship between this CFO and her CIO, Renee McKenzie, who is one of Ranganathan’s direct reports. “From my standpoint, the CFO team has a very good purview of the strategy,” she says. “We can work with business leaders to say, ‘Where do you want to start? I don’t think there’s a better home than the CFO office for CIO teams to report into.” 

See you tomorrow.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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