Is IT Really Just a Cost Center? Or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
It’s time to change the narrative—and ask what IT is really capable of.
You know how there are ideas that just sit there, completely unchallenged, because they’ve been around so long that nobody remembers to question them?
This feels like one of those.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that IT belongs in the same category as office rent and utilities—important, yeah, but ultimately just part of the cost of doing business. The goal is to keep it running and, if possible, keep it cheap.
But when you step back and really look at how companies are growing today—what’s actually driving competitive advantage—it’s not more salespeople or more warehouses. It’s faster decisions. More connected data. Smarter automation.
In other words… technology.
I’m not saying every IT dollar is automatically an investment in growth. Some of it probably is just keeping the lights on. But isn’t that exactly why this deserves a closer look?
How much of what we’re calling “IT spend” is just maintenance—and how much of it could be repositioned to actually move the business forward?
And if the answer is “not much,” maybe the problem isn’t with the spending… maybe it’s with how we’re using it.
That’s the uncomfortable part of this line of thinking. If we really believe IT is just a cost center, we might have to admit that we’re the ones keeping it there.
This isn’t about budgets. It’s about mental models.
Because as long as we treat IT like overhead, that’s all it will ever be. But if we’re willing to ask some harder questions—if we’re willing to reimagine what that team could be working on—we might find that we’re sitting on more leverage than we realized.
If this sparked some new thinking, and you’re curious what it might look like to apply it inside your organization, I’m happy to have that conversation. No pitch—just exploration.