Aligning technology spend with commercial objectives

Ask a founder or managing director what their technology spend is for, and you usually get one of two answers. Either a list of tools ("we pay for Shopify, HubSpot, a dev agency, some AWS…"), or a list of projects ("we're rebuilding the app, migrating the ERP, trying some AI").

Neither answer says what the business gets in return. And that is the root of most of the waste I see: spend that was sensible when it was approved, and has since drifted away from what the business is actually trying to achieve.

Here is the approach I use to bring the two back together.

Start with no more than three commercial objectives

Not "digital transformation". Not "modernise the stack". Commercial objectives are the things the board would celebrate:

• Grow revenue in a specific channel or market
• Improve gross margin or reduce cost to serve
• Increase customer retention or lifetime value
• Free up leadership time to grow the business

Pick no more than three for the next 12 months, and put a number on each one. If an objective cannot be measured, it cannot steer spending.

Map every line of spend to an objective

Take the full list of technology costs: software subscriptions, agencies and contractors, internal salaries for technical staff, cloud and hosting, and active projects. For each line, ask one question: which objective does this serve, and how would we know?

You will end up with four groups:

1. Clearly serving an objective. Protect and possibly increase it.
2. Keeping the lights on. Necessary, but it should be run as efficiently as possible, not grown.
3. Serving an old objective. It was justified once and is no longer needed. Review it.
4. Nobody can say. Cancel it, or give it 30 days to make its case.

The first time a business does this, groups 3 and 4 are usually larger than anyone expected. Duplicate tools, shelfware, retainers that outlived their projects, and features built for a customer segment you no longer chase.

Fund outcomes, not projects

Projects have a habit of continuing because they have started. Change the question from "is the project on track?" to "is the objective moving?"

In practice that means:

• Every initiative states the metric it will move and by roughly how much.
• Funding is released in stages, with a checkpoint at each one.
• Each checkpoint asks whether the evidence still supports the next stage, not whether the plan was followed.

This is not bureaucracy. It is a short conversation every few weeks that stops a twelve-month project from quietly turning into an eighteen-month one.

Watch the hidden costs

The licence fee is rarely the real cost of a tool. Look at:

• Integration and maintenance. Every new system needs to talk to the others, and those connections break.
• Training and adoption. A tool the team does not use costs you the subscription and the time spent on workarounds.
• Switching costs later. Being locked into a platform is a cost, even if it does not appear on an invoice.

A cheaper tool that fits your process will often beat a more powerful one that does not.

Make it a rhythm, not a one-off

Alignment decays. Set a quarterly review: the three objectives, the spend map, what moved, and what changes next quarter. One page is enough. The discipline matters more than the format.

What good looks like

When technology spend is aligned, three things become true. Leadership can explain where the money goes in one sentence per objective. The team knows why they are building what they are building. And when budgets tighten, the business knows exactly what to protect and what to cut, without a painful debate.

That clarity is usually worth more than any individual saving it finds.