Every board I sit on asks the same question when budget season comes round. What do we need to buy next. Almost none of them ask the harder question. What have we already bought that we’re not getting value from. That second question is the one worth asking first, and new research from Deloitte UK explains why.
What the data actually says
Deloitte surveyed 314 senior UK executives this year, director level and above, at organisations with at least £375 million in annual revenue, across six industries from financial services to life sciences. They backed the survey with ten in-depth executive interviews. The result is one of the more sobering pieces of research I’ve read this year, not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s quiet and specific.
Business leaders themselves believe that somewhere between 21% and 50% of the value in the technology they’ve already bought is sitting unused. Not unbought. Unused. Licensed, deployed, live in production, and still not delivering what it was supposed to.
Scale that up and the numbers get uncomfortable. 42% of organisations are now spending over £100 million outside their formal IT budget on digital transformation work, a parallel spending track running alongside the one your CFO actually scrutinises. In most organisations, nobody is checking whether it produces anything.
Why this happens
I see the pattern constantly across fractional engagements, and it’s rarely because anyone was careless. It’s because buying is a discrete event with a clear owner, a business case, and a sign-off, while using well is a continuous discipline with no natural owner at all.
Someone in the organisation can always tell you what was purchased, when, and for how much. Far fewer people can tell you who is actually using it, what for, and whether it’s still solving the problem it was bought to solve eighteen months ago.
Deloitte’s research points at the same gap from a different angle. When they asked what actually blocks organisations from closing the value gap, the top answer wasn’t more budget. It was technical debt. 85% of the organisations Deloitte classifies as “Innovation Leaders”, the ones actually pulling ahead, cite reducing technical debt as critical to getting value from transformation, and they rank it ahead of adding new capability.
Security concerns came next, cited by 49% as a critical barrier. And 75% pointed to culture and agility, not technology at all, as among the biggest factors in whether transformation pays off. Henning Krueger, British Airways’ Chief Digital and Information Officer, made the same point to Deloitte in blunter terms: running the business and transforming it aren’t two separate tracks you can staff and fund independently. They’re entwined, and treating them as separate is exactly how value quietly leaks away.
What I actually check for
When a new client brings me in, before we talk about a single new platform, I ask three questions. They sound almost too simple, which is usually the point.
First, of everything you’re currently paying for, what would you genuinely notice if it disappeared tomorrow. Most organisations can name perhaps a third of their stack with real confidence. The rest is assumed to matter because nobody’s had the difficult conversation about switching it off.
Second, who owns the outcome, not the procurement, of each major platform. A name on a purchase order is not the same as someone accountable for whether the thing is still earning its keep.
Third, when did you last measure this against what it was bought to achieve, and against what. If the honest answer is “at the business case stage, three years ago”, you’ve found your value gap without needing Deloitte to find it for you.
The uncomfortable bit for CIOs and CTOs
None of this is a comfortable message to bring to a board that’s used to hearing about the next investment. It’s much easier to present a new AI initiative with a clean, exciting business case than to stand up and say we need to spend the next two quarters properly using what we already have.
But the leaders Deloitte’s data calls out as pulling ahead aren’t the ones buying the most. They’re the ones treating technical debt reduction as seriously as they treat new capability, and building the discipline to keep asking whether what’s already live is actually working.
If you’re a CTO, CIO or CISO reading your own board pack this month, the exercise is worth an afternoon. Pull the list of everything with a live licence or contract. Against each one, write down who uses it, what it was meant to deliver, and when you last checked. You will find gaps. Most organisations do, according to their own leadership.
The next platform can wait a fortnight. The audit can’t, because every month it doesn’t happen is another month of the 21% to 50% Deloitte found simply sitting there, already paid for, still waiting to be worth something.
Source: Deloitte UK, “Bridging the tech value gap: Maximising returns on investment in digital transformation” (early 2026), based on a survey of 314 senior UK executives and ten executive interviews.