Is IT enabling growth and efficiency, or merely keeping things running?
I’m sure you’ve noticed that your IT costs keep rising. Subscriptions inflate. Vendor contracts renew each year. Devices become costlier. With all this spending, Gartner has predicted that total IT spending across Australia will reach $172 billion this year, up 8.9% from last year.
If it’s time to put your tech stack under scrutiny, I recommend analysing whether your investments align with the organisation’s strategy and the measurable value you receive from them. There are some practical steps you can take to mitigate financial risk, cut costs and streamline operations while retaining existing tools and integrating AI initiatives. This blog discusses these actions and how to develop an IT strategy that strengthens operations and positions your business to drive future growth.
Identify Areas of Unnecessary IT Spending
A strong start is understanding where you spend the most. Costs can accumulate when dealing with technologies that have evolved reactively rather than being future-proofed or planned for.
The most significant areas include:
- Legacy contracts: You might have software or vendor contracts that aren’t relevant or necessary. Instead of paying for systems that are no longer fit-for-purpose, revisit what you currently pay for and investigate whether the platform can be turned off or replaced with something that delivers more value.
- Underutilised Microsoft 365 features: Many companies pay for advanced capabilities within their Microsoft 365 subscription, but don’t make the most of these features. I commonly see businesses paying for separate tools when that capability is already in Microsoft 365; the customer was just not aware.
- Outdated infrastructure: Aged-out servers, an unsupported OS, and fragmented networks are often the culprits behind infrastructure that requires ongoing maintenance and other indirect costs.
While this type of evaluation uncovers redundant spend, it lays the foundation for identifying opportunities and redirecting investment to strategic priorities.
Implement Small Changes to Unlock Productivity Gains
Productivity gains rarely come from one major project. Often, the biggest wins come from addressing daily frustrations such as inaccurate document storage and manual handover errors between systems. The focus should lean more toward managing incremental improvements that, over time, will yield a return on investment.
Quick wins include:
- Process improvement: Analyse where your team loses time. The goal should be to identify where time, effort, and accuracy are being lost. Removing these points of friction delivers incremental gains that compound over time, particularly when workflows are reviewed as the business evolves.
- Automation opportunities: Once you’ve simplified the workflows, automate manual, rules-based processes as much as possible. For example, Microsoft Power Automate includes tools to reduce manual effort, integrate data and automate some steps in workflows.
- Optimise existing tools: Audit what you already pay for and investigate whether people still use it. You could be paying for more licenses than necessary. Always analyse whether you already pay for similar capabilities before adding a new platform to your tech stack.
AI for Quick Wins
The true key to delivering meaningful impact with AI is targeted application. Start where teams spend time sorting, searching, triaging or repeating predictable tasks.
Where to start:
- AI Chat: AI Chatbots are great starting places for simple yet impactful tasks like research, content creation and improving your writing.
- Personal AI Assistants: Microsoft 365 Copilot can significantly improve your personal productivity across a wide range of tasks, from preparing briefings and analysing information to drafting responses and surfacing relevant context at the right time, as it is grounded in your company data.
- AI Agents: Simple AI agents are a great way to improve information access across your organisation. Users can query agents and have information like policies, procedures and product information quickly and easily surfaced in a way that is easily consumed.
Importantly, it is critical not to completely outsource your work to AI. You can count on AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the final output still needs to be checked and refined before it can be considered complete.
Build an IT Strategy That Supports Long-Term Growth
A well-executed IT strategy focused on growth requires clear direction that links your tech stack to your commercial endeavours. This keeps you proactively ahead of issues, rather than reacting as and when issues arise.
An IT roadmap should:
- Document the current state. Capture systems, infrastructure health, security gaps, integration issues and user pain points to establish a clear baseline.
- Define the future state. Align requirements with the organisation’s direction, such as expansion, compliance uplift, customer experience improvement and scalability.
- Target quick wins that close the gap. See the examples listed above. There are usually targeted changes that quickly remove friction, reduce risk, or unlock capacity.
- Prioritise based on impact. Execute changes based on what requires immediate attention or will make a difference today and plan for what can wait.
- Include Governance. Ownership, decision authority, and review mechanisms prevent bad decisions, maintain the strategy, and ensure technology investment goes where it is needed.
Sustainable growth is built through alignment. With a clear roadmap, your organisation can reduce waste, improve reliability and create a technology foundation that future-proofs business growth.
Conclusion
All too often, business leaders tell me their technology is causing friction rather than enabling the business, and it’s usually because it was deployed without a clear view of the business objectives it needed to support.
Aside from reducing costs, an IT strategy creates a platform for sustainable growth. With clear direction, you can have the right tech to help the business gain further commercial advantage and scale.
Rodin Can Turn Friction into Function and Direct IT Toward Growth
Our experts can identify opportunities for improvement in your current environment and build a roadmap aligned with your commercial strategy. Our experienced CIO brings years of industry knowledge to plan, lead, and execute IT strategies that align with your goals, tech stack, and growth ambitions.
View our CIO as a Service page for more details and to get in touch with us.
