Expanding FinOps with an Informed Perspective

"Susan, your FinOps team has done such a great job making Cloud value transparent and managing those costs effectively that we were wondering if you could apply your process to our SaaS expenses."

Conversations like this from IT Executives to FinOps practitioners are happening at organizations around the globe at a frequency high enough that the newest FinOps Framework, released on March 20, now includes "Scopes". Scopes are the contexts within which FinOps will be applied within the organization, including Public Cloud, SaaS, Data Center, Licensing, AI, and 'Custom'.

It is exciting to see this natural expansion of success because it makes incorporating this framework into your ITFM practices a smoother transition. However, to continue the trend of great success, ensure that you are setting the right expectations for this expansion.

We know the best success in a FinOps practice comes with clean data.

Using lessons learned from decades of ITFM practices, we know that data is one of the biggest roadblocks to success when tying costs to value.

In the State of FinOps 2025 Survey, data-related items and the processes to manage assets and their data come up as roadblocks, even within PublicCloud data.

https://data.finops.org/library#20316

Anyone in IT Finance who has worked on projects to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of services or applications will tell you that their most significant challenges come from a lack of clean data. Using a FinOps mindset on incomplete and/or inaccurate data will result in the team encountering the same sandtraps as the historical approaches.

Expanding the scope will mean relying on data that could be out of your control. It may also be legacy data in production for years and may have been entered under evolving data standards. Getting the data well aligned (or defining acceptable business rules for alignment) will 100% require executive backing and an organization-wide mandate.

Any Framework (TBM, Gartner, FinOps, etc.) you choose to implement will not just shift how costs are allocated but also change how the organization defines and thinks about the value it provides.

So, should we avoid expanding the scope of FinOps?  Absolutely not !

When that question comes to you, as it did to Susan above, ensure that you set expectations and get the executive support needed for success. How should Susan reply to that request?

Susan: I am excited to take that on. I want to investigate the systems, data, and stakeholders who need to be involved to make this a success. I will set up a kickoff meeting to get everyone on board—your participation will be key to that rollout—and then draft a timeline for your review. Can I count on your support?