The chief of the finance department and the chief of the IT department have probably always enjoyed a healthy tension, as the dueling goals of cost-management and innovation vie for dominance.  In our pressure-cooker times, however, the tension has been known to get intense, and it can become difficult to fully appreciate the other chief's point of view.

For a little perspective on collectively maximizing the two viewpoints, we can look to Steve Snodgrass, CIO and CFO at Graniterock, a mid-market provider of construction materials in Watsonville, Calif. Graniterock has a quarry that sits on the San Andreas Fault and 20 locations from Oakland to Monterey Bay. I recently spoke with Snodgrass about his disaster recovery initiative (see the Q&A), and I learned that he approaches that--and other IT challenges--with both finance and technology in mind. I asked him how he handles the duality in his job.

"I am torn in two directions and the cognitive dissonance is huge," he told me. "The nice thing about having a finance background is that when I have clarity about the issues, I can translate that to a business benefit. We look at alternative ways of shaving a nickel, but we also try to be innovative."

The dissonance can be especially apparent, Snodgrass said, when he sees employees suffering because of insufficient IT. For example, Graniterock's locations, which vary considerably in size, are connected to the data center via wide area network. Some locations have slower network speeds than others, and recently employees suffering under slow speeds wanted to increase network bandwidth. Snodgrass said that his finance background flagged that as the wrong solution. ("I call [adding bandwidth] the gift that keeps on giving," he said.) After weighing both finance and IT considerations, he decided to try out a WAN optimization solution instead, and so far it's proving successful.

Snodgrass began heading up IT at Graniterock around 2002, when he was the company's corporate controller. Because he didn't come from an IT background, it isn't so hard for him to recognize when his relatively small operation is less equipped than an outside provider to handle IT responsibilities. Graniterock turned to a hosted ERP solution in 2001, long before anyone was buzzing about the cloud.

I asked how Graniterock's IT pros felt about having to answer to a finance chief once he donned the CIO hat. Luckily, he said, they were too busy to worry about it. "We were on the bleeding edge of several things at that point," he recalled. "We had installed a VoIP system, which we had moved over during Thanksgiving weekend of 2001, and we had massive VoIP issues throughout 2002. We also had residual Y2K issues. Those were whirlwind years." - Caron