FinOps and Data ROI: The blueprint for smarter, value-driven investments

We have all used ROI to evaluate projects, but data platform owners need to think about Data ROI as a way to ensure business value is generated from their foundational platform work.

OCT. 9, 2025

5 Min Read

Scott Davis

My analysis across a large portfolio of data projects shows a clear and consistent pattern for maximizing business value. The fundamental principle is that you need to have transparency and accountability for every dollar invested, with the goal that it results in more than a dollar of business value. A robust FinOps platform delivers the metrics that help to drive informed data investment decisions.

Two paths to data platform adoption

When building a large-scale data platform, organizations typically follow one of two paths:

"Implement Fast and Optimize Later": This approach prioritizes speed over efficiency, leading to rapid, often uncontrolled cost growth. The focus is on getting projects live, proving value, with little consideration for ongoing operational expenses.

Pros: Short-term business value is delivered fast with limited investment.
Cons: Long-term business value is not guaranteed, with refactoring likely required.

"Invest in Foundational FinOps": This strategic approach integrates FinOps, automation, optimizations, and system transparency from the outset. It prioritizes making smart, value-driven investment decisions from day one.

Pros: Long-term business value can be identified and predicted at scale
Cons: Initial POC can be slower

The difference between these two approaches can be illustrated by the following two graphics

A typical pattern associated with Implement Fast will often result in a spike in spend that does not deliver value. This spend is usually a surprise and requires manual intervention to fix the excess spend. In this scenario, cost and business value are disconnected but a test solution is built fast.

In contrast to the “Implement Fast”, the image above connects spend to business value and builds in automated cost optimization. This drives significantly more long term value but requires more foundational auto-optimization work up front.

The Power of Return on Data Spend

In advertising, Ad managers meticulously track Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to ensure every advertising dollar is well-spent. Data platform owners should adopt a similar metric: Return on Data Spend (RODS).

Historically, data platforms lacked the granular detail for this type of analysis, whereas modern platforms like Databricks now offer fine-grained system tables and cost reporting. You can now measure the actual value generated by each data project against its cost.

Here's a real-world example of how RODS drives value:

This example shows an approximate 20x return on investment. Each of these projects was identified and implemented as a direct result of focusing on value, not just cost. Notice that not all projects were successful. FinOps does not guarantee success, but it does allow for successful projects to move forward while unsuccessful projects are stopped or reevaluated.

The core benefits of FinOps for data

A well-implemented FinOps strategy provides tangible benefits that go far beyond simple cost reduction.

1. Cost optimization & visibility

FinOps provides a reliable framework to manage the variable spend of cloud data services. This enables:

Cost predictability: Move from unexpected "bill shock" to predictable, forecasted expenses that you can budget for.
Granular cost allocation: Precisely attribute costs to specific projects, teams, or business units.
Waste reduction: Proactively identify and eliminate underutilized and unused resources as well as over resourced resources.

2. Enhanced collaboration & accountability

FinOps breaks down departmental silos and fosters a culture of shared ownership. It brings together data engineering, finance, and business teams to:

Make value-driven decisions: Ensure technology choices are directly tied to business outcomes.
Promote shared ownership: Empower engineering teams with cost visibility, so they can make cost-effective architectural decisions from the start.

3. Operational efficiency & agility

FinOps principles help data teams operate more efficiently, which in turn boosts overall business trust and agility.

Automated governance: Establish policies and guardrails to control spending and prevent excess data spend.
Increased innovation: With a clear understanding of costs, teams can experiment and innovate without the fear of uncontrolled spending.

FinOps transforms cloud spending from a chaotic, variable expense into a strategic lever for growth and innovation.

How to be successful with FinOps

To successfully launch your FinOps platform, you need three core elements:

End-to-end data governance
Advanced automated optimizations
Detailed analytics and reporting

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform provides a powerful foundation for FinOps, integrating a single unified platform with robust governance, automatic business semantics, and advanced AI capabilities.

Among a long list of value drivers, Databricks offers two built-in features that deliver industry leading value.

1. AI-Powered Cost Optimization

By integrating advanced AI, the Databricks Platform is designed to optimize outcomes and increase efficiency. It achieves this by simultaneously reducing costs (via intelligent workload management and optimized autoscaling), improving performance (with Predictive I/O and Liquid Clustering), and strengthening governance. Overall, the platform simplifies and accelerates the development of innovative, enterprise-grade AI applications by directly boosting productivity and cost savings.

2. Predictive Optimization

Get the best performance effortlessly with Predictive Optimization. By employing Unity Catalog and Lakehouse AI, the system automatically identifies optimal data configurations and runs them on dedicated serverless infrastructure. This eliminates manual tuning and ensures you pay only for the compute that drives results.

Databricks Provides The Blueprint for Value-Driven Data Investments

The days of treating cloud data platforms as an uncontrollable cost center are over. Organizations must abandon the high-risk, blind refactoring model and commit to building in a well informed, deliberate way driven by financial transparency and accountability.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform offers the ideal foundation, unifying governance and advanced AI. By embedding FinOps principles, organizations can establish a mature, accountable, and agile data platform that guarantees sustained, scalable business value.

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