There have been a number of occasions recently when I have been speaking to CIOs that they have said to me they don’t always think they are the most popular person in the senior management team in an organisation. I have had other CIOs say to me “I don’t really think I am properly understood” and I have been dismissing this as a little bit of paranoia from the CIO community.

Then last week I came across a CFO Research report entitled ‘Are CFOs from Mars and CIOs from Venus?’. I had a read of the management summary and I would like to share with you a couple of the key findings from this report which perhaps show that CIOs are not paranoid after all and it may in fact be true.

The first summary was that there is a perception gap between CIOs and CFOs that hinders a shared agenda. Questions about leadership, the ability to collaborate and long term strategic thinking and planning illicit marked differences in the way senior finance and IT managers see each other. Overall CIOs express a much better opinion of the CFO than vice versa. 6 in 10 CIOs rate their CFOs as excellent whereas only 3 in 10 CFOs rate their CIOs as highly.

The second key finding is when invited to state their biggest frustrations with CIOs, many CFOs concur that a better understanding of financial reality would help CIOs deliver more value - perhaps this is code for them speaking in too much of a technical language. But, better communication tops the wish list from most CIOs who also cite more frequent communication and even forced communication as the only ways to speak with a CFO.

So there does seem to be problem here: it does appear that CIOs and CFOs in a meeting room probably speak different languages. To frame respective priorities in a common language, research confirms that CIOs and CFOs must lay better ground work, but how? How can you make sure that there is that common language?

In my view the way to overcome this problem is to make sure you rotate the business experts into IT and give the IT employees opportunities in the business - get into each other’s shoes, share each other’s jobs and devise a common language.

So would anybody from Venus or Mars like to comment?