Carlo Wejszko, 2024/2025

Executive Summary

As organizations continue to embrace cloud transformation, FinOps has emerged as a critical discipline for aligning cloud financial management with business objectives. The FinOps Foundation's framework, while rich in capabilities, lacks prescriptive guidance on adoption pathways. This whitepaper introduces a strategic clustering approach based on extensive maturity assessments and field research over the past 3 years of customer engagements and strategic delivery. It demonstrates how grouping FinOps capabilities into clusters aligned to business goals accelerates adoption, improves efficiency, and enhances stakeholder engagement.

Additionally, we explore frequently encountered adoption patterns, special use-case contexts (e.g. migration and federated organizations), and the emergence of new capabilities in a decentralized operational landscape, to help other organizations learn from the research and analysis, and accelerate their own planning and adoption.

The Need for Direction in FinOps Adoption

The FinOps Foundation provides a robust framework of 22 capabilities across 4 key Domains (Understanding Cloud Usage and Cost, Quantifying Business Value, Optimizing Cloud Usage and Cost, and Managing the FinOps Practice). While these capabilities are defined as services that need to be adopted, the FinOps Foundation provides little guidance on how and when to implement them. Many organizations find themselves asking: "What's first?"

This whitepaper proposes a research-backed clustering model that groups FinOps capabilities in logical, outcome-oriented clusters. The model provides organizations with clear pathways tailored to their business objectives, cloud maturity, and operational structure.

Core Concept: Strategic Clustering of Capabilities

At the heart of this model lies the concept of capability clustering; grouping related FinOps capabilities that collectively contribute to a specific business goal. The clustering approach acknowledges that most teams cannot adopt all capabilities simultaneously and instead, they need to focus on strategic outcomes, building capabilities progressively in phases, one at a time.

Diagram: Example clustering for the 'self-funded' Business Objective

Clustering capability development and maturity allows teams to:
- Specialize and deliver measurable results quickly in one area, showing results sooner
- Align practices with business objectives, showing value in the deliverables each time
- Improve time-to-delivery for outcomes like cost optimization or visibility due to the reduction of 'context switching', and working with the same groups/departments in the org
- Enable repeatable and scalable FinOps adoption, accelerating the delivery time overall

Alignment to Business Objectives

A central theme of this approach is aligning FinOps practices with business outcomes. Capability clusters must serve measurable business goals, whether those are operational efficiency, spend transparency, or value creation.

Diagram: In FinOps Consultancy services, we see a strong positive engagement from the broader business when capability development aligned with the business objectives being pursued.

Examples:

- Cost Reduction → Self-Fund Cluster → % Savings Realized

- Financial Accountability → Visibility Cluster → % Spend Attributed

- Risk Management → Control Cluster → Policy Compliance

- Design for Profitability → Unit Economics → Cloud Cost per Transaction

- Organizational Enablement → Consultation/Federated → Practice Readiness Score

The Role of Education and Enablement

Across all adoption patterns, FinOps Education & Enablement remains a foundational pillar that drives cultural change. Training, change management, and stakeholder education must precede or accompany capability development.

This includes:

- Structured enablement programs

- Certification pathways for practitioners

- Workshops on cloud cost culture and accountability

Successful FinOps adoption is about driving cultural change through people and processes. Keep this central to the FinOps practice's own internal goals.

Challenges to the FinOps Framework, and Recommendations

Despite the growing maturity of the FinOps discipline, many organizations encounter persistent challenges during adoption. These challenges are often systemic, cultural, or organizational in nature and can hinder the effectiveness and scalability of FinOps practices.

One of the most significant challenges is that organizations often struggle to prioritize initiatives, which can lead to fragmented progress or duplication of effort. Without a structured adoption roadmap, teams may invest heavily in tools or reporting features without establishing the foundational practices necessary to support them.

Another common pitfall is the "tooling-first" approach, where organizations begin their FinOps journey by procuring or configuring a toolset without aligning stakeholders or defining desired outcomes. While tools can enhance visibility and automation, they cannot replace the strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and cultural alignment required for FinOps success. Implementing tools without a supporting framework often leads to underutilized platforms and unmet expectations.

Organizational silos further complicate the adoption of FinOps. In many enterprises, financial and technical teams operate in isolation, with limited shared language or joint objectives. Finance teams may focus on cost reduction, while engineering teams prioritize performance and scalability. Without a unifying FinOps practice, these teams fail to collaborate on shared metrics, accountability structures, or governance frameworks, leading to missed opportunities and conflicting goals.

Lastly, cultural inertia is a major obstacle. Many organizations overlook the importance of cultural change and fail to embed cost accountability into day-to-day operations. Delays in launching training programs, resistance to transparency, or a lack of executive sponsorship can stall momentum. In environments where cloud cost management is viewed as an afterthought rather than a core practice, FinOps initiatives tend to be reactive rather than strategic.

To address these challenges, several recommendations emerge from successful FinOps engagements.

First and foremost, organizations should start with a clear business goal or goals. Rather than diving into implementation without direction, teams should identify the specific outcomes they want to achieve; be it cost savings, spend transparency, policy enforcement, or efficiency gains. Letting business goals guide capability selection ensures that adoption is purposeful and relevant.

Remember, clustering capabilities logically helps to streamline adoption. Instead of taking on every FinOps function simultaneously, teams should focus on clusters of capabilities that complement each other and support the same strategic objective. This approach accelerates maturity in targeted areas and makes progress measurable and sustainable.

A critical and often overlooked recommendation is "don't skip visibility". Visibility into cloud usage and spend is the foundation of any FinOps practice. Without it, organizations cannot justify further investments, hold teams accountable, or prioritize optimizations. Establishing comprehensive, real-time visibility enables data-driven decision-making and sets the stage for more advanced practices such as budgeting, forecasting, and sustainability.

Finally, organizations must enable their teams through education. Cultural change cannot occur in a vacuum. Effective enablement involves structured training programs, stakeholder workshops, and shared learning opportunities that help build a common language around cloud financial management. Education ensures that teams understand not just how to use FinOps tools, but why their roles matter in achieving broader business objectives.

By confronting these challenges and following these recommendations, organizations can significantly increase the effectiveness of their FinOps adoption journey-transforming cloud spend from a source of anxiety into a source of strategic value.

Domains of Capabilities and Their Maturity Progression

Based on the maturity data from real-world engagements, we have categorized capabilities into three levels:

Foundational: Entry-point capabilities; the core building blocks

Intermediate: Value-driven enhancements

Advanced: Deep integration and optimization; requires other capabilities in place

These maturity levels reflect both technical sophistication and organizational readiness. FinOps capabilities must evolve with cloud maturity, and not all organizations require advanced capabilities in the early phases. Some only need a sub-set of these capabilities.

Diagram: Remixed FinOps capabilities into logical levels based on our research and maturity assessment data gathered since the framework update

 

Strategic Capability Clusters & Adoption Patterns

Example adoption patterns that have been regularly encountered during the research period have been mapped out in the following sections, but it should be noted that these can themselves be tuned to individual organizations who may take the clusters in slightly different sequences or orders. Be flexible and prepared to shift as goal priority changes in the business and flex with it to avoid being an area that it slow to react and align.

- Self-Fund: Achieving quick wins to justify investment

- Visibility: Understanding who is spending and where

- Migration: when an organization is migrating from one set of tooling to another, but has established practices already

- Consultation: Provided by 3^rd party entities that provide managed services (uncommonly known as FinOps as a Service (FaaS)

- Federated Organizations: Where FinOps is split into 'Group services', and sub-entities that are technical Functions

The Self-Fund Adoption Pattern

The primary goal is seeking quick wins as fast as possible, sacrificing all other capability development.

Control is sometimes thought of as a method of generating savings or increasing value later, as it is preventing the introduction of cost into the cloud without processes and checks.

For some practices, control can appear alongside ramping up the practice but can also happen during the Visibility cluster where this becomes a focal area of maturity.

Objective: Rapid savings to make the FinOps initiative self-sustaining

Step-One Capabilities:

- Data Ingestion (a fundamental requirement for this pattern)

- Rate Optimization

- Workload Optimization

- Tools and Services

- Anomaly Management (although this requires a number of things to exist before it can be delivered)

Key Insight: Organizations in this cluster often prioritize "what will save money now," sidelining broader FinOps development. This tactical focus is driven by internal justification pressure, FinOps must "pay for itself" within a fixed window (typically 6 months).

 

The Visibility Adoption Pattern

Objective: Gain insight into cloud spend before pursuing cost reduction

Although visibility is the primary goal, adding value usually enters shortly after and is quickly seen as an opportunity to generate justification of the practice.

Sometimes, ramping the practice itself is bypassed, so greater visibility in areas like licensing, and Unit economics follows.

Once Visibility is established, the business typically seeks to Control the spend via budgets, policy, chargeback, and the onboarding process itself.

Adoption Pattern: Common in organizations where central stakeholders express: "I don't care about saving money (right now), I just want to know who's spending it."

Maturity Progression: Once visibility is achieved, teams often expand to capabilities that add value and control cost, like budgeting, unit economics, and chargeback.

Step-One Capabilities:

- Data Ingestion

- Allocation

- Reporting & Analytics

- Forecasting

- Planning and Estimating

- Sustainability (sometimes, however we have a limited dataset on this capabilities adoption)

Migration-Driven FinOps

Organizations migrating from legacy tooling or other FinOps platforms often have established practices. Their focus is primarily on replicating existing core capabilities and ensuring continuity. This also has application when two organizations merge, and there is a business decision to consolidate to a single set of tools.

Scope:

- Replicate Data Ingestion, Allocation, and Reporting

- Preserve historical benchmarks

- Re-evaluate or expand the tooling as needed

Emerging capabilities like Sustainability or Architecting for Cloud may be added opportunistically during the migration activity.

 

Consultation-led Adoption

Some organizations prefer to build FinOps capabilities independently but seek guidance on strategy and architecture, usually as a wrapper service, or one that is strategic and advisory only (FinOps as a Service).

Role of Advisory:

- Clarify adoption sequence based on maturity

- Identify interdependencies between capabilities

- Provide non-technical enablement (e.g. governance, training)

This model places a premium on strategic guidance over hands-on delivery.

When engagements have been purely consultative, these are the 'action areas' and points of concentration for advice and guidance. When they do not have technical backgrounds, we have usually provided architectural advice later.

 

Federated Organizations

A growing number of enterprises FinOps functions operate in federated environments, where a central FinOps team provides tooling, reporting, and policy templates, but individual business units are responsible for implementation.

More recently found in 'Federated' organizations, a Central FinOps team delivers core functions, and leaves the rest to individual technical arms of the business divisions under it.

Technical challenges, expertise, advice, and guidance are 'out of scope' and pushed out to the individual sub-divisions to develop independently.

Central Team Responsibilities:

- Tooling and shared services

- Common training and enablement

- Central purchasing for discounting and reservations

- Cost group aggregation and benchmarking

- Pre-built governance and policies

A new Scope emerges, Federated Organizations, where some capabilities are under the jurisdiction of 'central' functions, and others not.

A new Capability emerges, 'Managing federated FinOps' when the Central FinOps team develops systems to allow sharing of ideas and methodologies between divisions, democratize decisions, group-cost management, tackling buy-in for policies and governance.

Other emerging adoption patterns

Control-focused Pattern

Objective: Enable policy-driven spend governance and forecasting

Goal Capabilities:

- Budgeting

- Forecasting

- Chargeback & Showback

- Policy & Governance

Characteristically, these goals are predicated by the Visibility Adoption Pattern (and must include some of the core capabilities to support it). Includes both financial and operational stakeholders who will have key objectives that must be understood and prioritized. Frequently driven by risk mitigation concerns or after incidents that have placed organizations in significant risk situations.

FinOps as a Service (FaaS)

We are increasingly seeing a shift in the FinOps engagement model, particularly among Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and our partners who operate as intermediaries between cloud platforms and their end customers. In these cases, our clients are not just implementing FinOps practices for their own internal benefit but they are extending those capabilities outward to support and manage cloud spend on behalf of their customers. This introduces additional complexity around reporting, cost attribution, governance, and service-level visibility.

IBM Consulting plays a crucial role in this evolving ecosystem by acting as both a strategic partner and an enabler. Our role is to facilitate these multi-layered engagements by helping MSPs design scalable FinOps architectures, define clear use cases, and implement flexible governance models that can serve diverse customer portfolios. This includes building federated cost management frameworks, supporting multi-tenant visibility solutions, and advising on pricing, showback, and chargeback models tailored to external customer environments. By doing so, IBM Partner Relationships empowers MSPs to deliver FinOps as a service, driving both internal operational efficiency and external customer value. This engagement model highlights the growing demand for FinOps capabilities not just within organizations, but as a competitive differentiator in customer-facing cloud services.

Sustainability-Focused Adoption Pattern

In this pattern, orgs wish to align FinOps with sustainability goals by optimizing resource usage, minimizing waste, and reporting on environmental impact as key deliverables.

For context, this is being driven by increasing pressure from regulators, investors, and customers, organizations are looking to embed sustainability into their core cloud operations. For some, it's part of a larger corporate carbon reduction strategy. For others, it's a matter of corporate responsibility and public trust.

Typical Business Objectives look like "We want to understand the environmental impact of our cloud usage, reduce carbon emissions, and report on sustainability metrics without sacrificing performance or stifle innovation."

Goal Capabilities:

- Cloud Sustainability Reporting

- Architecting for Cloud Efficiency

- Unit Economics

Complementing these deliverables, we see demand in Policy & Governance, Benchmarking and of course, FinOps Education & Enablement.

All of the above is underpinned by tooling, data ingestion, and reporting as foundational capabilities. A sustainability-driven FinOps model positions cloud usage not just as a technical or financial domain, but as a lever for environmental responsibility. Organizations pursuing this pathway are likely to strengthen their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standing, reduce operating costs through efficiency, and appeal to environmentally conscious customers and investors.

Conclusion

FinOps adoption is not linear. It must be tailored to the organization's maturity, priorities, and structure. This whitepaper introduces a strategic clustering model that guides organizations through informed, purposeful FinOps capability development. By aligning clusters to business outcomes, enabling cultural transformation, and acknowledging contextual constraints like federation or migration, enterprises can scale their FinOps practices more effectively, and make cloud spending a competitive advantage.

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Carlo Wejszko
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