Focus on Singapore Investment Immigration and Life in Singapore: Compared to their counterparts in other countries, CFOs in Singapore have significantly more influence over IT decision-making, which necessitates their increased attention to the latest technological trends in the industry.
According to a survey conducted by the executive recruitment firm Robert Half, 50% of local companies surveyed in Singapore indicated that their true IT leader is neither the CIO nor the CTO, but the CFO. Robert Half noted that the average global figure for the same survey is 40%, making Singapore one of the countries with the highest proportion in the surveyed region. This IT decision-maker survey involved 2,075 CFOs and financial executives across 14 countries, including 150 from Singapore, with other countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
In Singapore, the IT and finance teams of companies are currently the two departments that collaborate most closely, with 83% of respondents indicating that the connection between the IT and finance departments has become increasingly tight over the past three years, compared to 61% globally. 67% of companies believe that closer collaboration has effectively improved work efficiency, 48% stated that it can enhance their profitability, while another 23% believe that business costs will subsequently decrease.
Stella Tang, the Singapore regional head of Robert Half, believes that most companies still view IT as a "burden" from a certain perspective, focusing more on budget and cost issues, which makes it natural to delegate IT decision-making to the finance team. Clearly, companies in Singapore are following a different path in their understanding of IT decision-making, seemingly finding a way to enhance collaboration between the finance and IT teams by allowing the finance department to make IT decisions.
Stella Tang points out that finance personnel in Singapore companies now also have to start paying attention to technical issues and need to understand popular enterprise-level technology trends more. If Singaporean companies truly want to improve their decision-making efficiency in this way, future financial executives will inevitably need to frequently participate in the IT aspects of business operations, which will undoubtedly bring more challenges for both CFOs and CIOs.
