There's a particular kind of board conversation that happens once IT cost has quietly outgrown the value anyone can point to: budgets get scrutinised line by line, a cost-cutting mandate gets issued, and six months later the cost base is a little smaller and the underlying fragmentation, sourcing complexity and platform sprawl are exactly where they were.
Why generic cost-cutting doesn't hold
Cutting cost without changing the operating model that produced it is a temporary result. The cost comes back, usually within a budget cycle or two, because the sourcing model, the platform complexity and the governance that let cost drift in the first place haven't actually changed.
What value recovery actually assesses
- The real cost base - not the budgeted one - across platforms, suppliers and sourcing arrangements
- Where platform complexity is creating cost that has no matching business value
- Governance and decision rights between IT and the business, and whether they're actually followed
- A future operating model and a 100-day mobilisation plan that survives contact with reality
What this looks like in practice
On a European energy provider's technology transformation, independent judgement - diagnosing programme health, vendor performance and true delivery risk, then resetting governance - recovered €35M in value and brought the transformation back under executive control. That is what CIO-level value recovery looks like when it's done properly: not a smaller number on a spreadsheet, but a different, more accountable relationship between IT cost and business value.
Our IT Value Recovery service is built around that same diagnostic rigour - for boards that need to recover value from IT that has become too expensive, too fragmented or too slow, and want a plan that actually holds.