Publications

Rich Hoyer and FinOptik have published extensively on the relationship between Finance and Engineering in cloud and AI, including work co-written with AWS Enterprise Strategy and Google Cloud. The through-line across all of it is that the hard part of cloud financial management was never the technology. It was getting two organizations with different languages, different pressures, and different definitions of a good answer to trust each other's numbers.

Co-published with cloud providers

Unveiling Blind Spots in FinOps

Co-Written with Chris Hennesey, AWS Enterprise Strategy

Unveiling Blind Spots in FinOps
Co-written with Chris Hennesey, AWS Enterprise Strategist and former technology CFO at Capital One. Examines four blind spots that reduce financial visibility and control, including limited spend visibility, and that evade even vigilant executive attention. AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog

**Whitepaper:**
**Unlocking the Value of Cloud FinOps with a New Operating Model**

Co-Written with Google Cloud

Unlocking the Value of Cloud FinOps with a New Operating Model
Whitepaper co-written with Google Cloud. The global operating model framework enterprises use to structure cloud financial governance, covering organizational design, accountability, and the capabilities a mature practice requires. Google Cloud

Teaching Finance and Engineering to speak each other's language

Implementing FinOps, Part 1: Understanding Accrual Accounting

The need for a collaborative relationship where engineering teams value financial systems, and finance teams understand technical challenges.

Implementing FinOps, Part 1: Understanding Accrual Accounting
Written for technical leaders. Explains why Finance pressures engineering for specific cost reports every period, and what accrual accounting actually requires. Once a CTO understands what the close process demands, the requests stop looking arbitrary. ProsperOps

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.2: CFO’s Guide to Cloud Billing Fundamentals

How IT Procurement Changed Dramatically With Cloud

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.2: CFO's Guide to Cloud Billing Fundamentals
Written for finance leaders. How IT procurement changed dramatically with cloud, and what a CFO needs to understand about consumption-based billing to evaluate it properly. ProsperOps

**Winning Trust with Technical Leaders as Change Agents**

Learning early as a practitioner; lessons in a meeting that went completely off the rails

Winning Trust with Technical Leaders as Change Agents
Lessons from a meeting that went completely off the rails, and what it taught about earning credibility with engineering organizations. InformationWeek

Implementing FinOps, Part 2: Fostering Cross-Departmental Collaboration
How to bridge the gap in cross-departmental interactions, and why the relationship between tech and finance has historically been strained by lack of shared vocabulary rather than lack of goodwill. ProsperOps

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.1: Understanding Technology and Finance Personas

Tips for Finance Professionals When Dealing with Technical Personas and Vice-Versa

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.1: Tech and Finance Personas
Why finance practitioners are rigid about formats and impatient about deadlines. Imagine asking dozens of teams for month-end results and receiving different formats, some cash basis, some accrual, some other. Finance rigidity is a survival response to that problem. ProsperOps

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.3: CFO's Guide to Information Technology Basics
A 10,000-foot tour of IT for finance practitioners. Only a high-level view is needed to become sufficiently conversant, and that conversance changes every subsequent conversation. ProsperOps

Implementing FinOps, Part 3.4: Financial Reportability As An Architectural Imperative
Breaking through the development silo. Cost visibility is an architecture decision made at design time, not a reporting problem solved afterward. ProsperOps

Building The Practice

**Architecting Workloads for Financial Reporting: Best Practices**

A list of best practices for cloud architects to design systems to optimize FinOps

Architecting Workloads for Financial Reporting: Best Practices
Practices for cloud architects designing systems that are financially reportable from the start. eWeek

**Cloud Cost Management Tooling: What are the options?**

Examining the use cases and pros and cons of each 3 types of these toolsets

Cloud Cost Management Tooling: What Are the Options?
The three categories of cost management tooling, with use cases and trade-offs for each. Tool-agnostic by design. SADA

4 Reasons Your Cloud Operations Need a FinOps Team

When a designated FinOps team has yet to be established, no one is formally accountable

4 Reasons Your Cloud Operations Need a FinOps Team - TheNewStack
When no designated FinOps team exists, no one is formally accountable for cloud financial outcomes. What changes when accountability is assigned.

**Downloadable Guide - Cloud Cost Segmentation Guide**

Visibility and Reporting, Operating Efficiency, and Budgeting and Forecasting

Cloud Cost Segmentation Strategy Guide
Downloadable guide covering visibility and reporting, operating efficiency, and budgeting and forecasting. SADA

**Unit Costing: The Next Frontier in Cloud FinOps**

How you can leverage it to create sustainable business value from the cloud - **Co-written with Google**

Unit Costing: The Next Frontier in Cloud FinOps
Co-written with Google. How unit economics creates sustainable business value from cloud rather than one-time savings. SADA

**3 FinOps Dataset Integration Success Stories**

Chargebacks on containerized workloads, departmental chargebacks & isolating the cost of licenses

3 FinOps Dataset Integration Success Stories
Chargebacks on containerized workloads, departmental chargebacks, and isolating license costs. SADA

On Investment Decisions

**Andreessen Horowitz is dead wrong about cloud**

Is repatriation to on-prem really a good idea?

Andreessen Horowitz Is Dead Wrong About Cloud
A counterargument to the repatriation thesis, examining whether moving back on-prem actually holds up financially. VentureBeat

**Top 4 Cloud Migration Business Case Mistakes**

Enterprises should start by documenting the qualitative elements of the migration

Top 4 Cloud Migration Business Case Mistakes
Why enterprises should start by documenting the qualitative elements of a migration before modeling the quantitative ones. TheNewStack

On AI

The AI FinOps Leader: What the Job Actually Demands
A new job description is appearing at large enterprises, and the gap between the posting and the job is considerable. What this person is actually asked to do across finance, engineering, organizational change, and a landscape that keeps shifting underneath them. Why the combination is rare, why the search is only the first problem, and how organizations build the capability before the hire arrives, alongside them once they do, or on a retained basis if the volume never justifies the headcount. FinOptik

Why Finance Doesn't Trust Your AI Numbers
The binding constraint on most AI programs is not technical. It is whether the finance organization believes the numbers it is being shown. Why finance rigidity gets misread as skepticism about the investment, why the costs that generate no invoice are usually the larger number, why AI is harder to model than cloud was, and what changes when the methodology is one both organizations recognize as sound. FinOptik

Podcasts

Navigating Cloud Cost Complexities

Where cloud cost management breaks down inside large organizations, and why complexity in billing, allocation, and shared costs makes financial reporting harder than the underlying spend suggests.

Faces in FinOps, Episode 12
Rich's path from finance into technology, and how that direction of crossing shapes FinOptik's approach. ProsperOps

Aligning Finance and IT Around Cloud Costs
Panel discussion on why cloud financial management responsibilities fall to engineering rather than finance, and how a shared lexicon changes that. With Rich Hoyer, Joe Mastroianni (Director of Cloud Governance, Trimble), and Charlie Flynn (former CFO of Global Technology, JPMorgan Chase). ProsperOps

The Role of Automation in FinOps

With Rich Hoyer and Joe Henderson of ProsperOps. What should be automated in a FinOps practice, what should not, and why people and process have to come before tooling.

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