Justify every technology dollar from zero

Sound familiar?

The technology budget is last year's number plus a few percent. It doesn't fit SaaS contracts that step up on renewal, projects that spend on milestones, or the cloud bill that follows usage. Finance sees the totals and IT sees the detail, and the two never meet except at year end, when the overrun is already there.

What we do

We rebuild the budget from the ground up. Every line is justified against the capability it serves and the total cost of owning it: licences, infrastructure, support, the people who keep it running, and the cost of changing it. Duplicate systems and outdated technology come out, and the money is redirected to the capabilities the strategy depends on.

Then we make it stick. Planning, approvals and renewals are digitised in one flow. A spend dashboard shows OPEX and CAPEX by department, project and expense type, so overspending is visible in the month it starts rather than the year it ends. Contracts go into one book with a renewal forecast and a buffer for inflation and the increases vendors write into their terms. Finance and IT work from the same numbers, which is the whole point.

What it has produced

At a North American utility with $30M a year in IT maintenance, a TCO view, a Tableau dashboard on its existing SAP BI and a book of 186 contracts aligned actual spend to the 2025 budget and prevented a repeat of a $3M overrun, on a $150,000 engagement: 20 times the fee. IT financial management at a North American utility →

At a global bank, spreading the cost of shared platforms across the years and the units that used them ended the first-mover disadvantage and lifted adoption from 20% to 46%. Technology cost optimisation at a large global bank →

How we'd start

Before your next budget cycle, ideally a quarter before. We need the ledger, the contract register and an afternoon each with finance and IT. The first deliverable is the TCO view; the budget is built on it.