Right now, somewhere in your company, a renewal notice is waiting to be signed for a system nobody has seriously questioned in years. It will go through. Meanwhile, a new project that is a fraction of its size is being put through a business case, a steering committee, and a procurement review, defended line by line. The larger the spend, the less anyone asks.

I have spent my career around enterprise technology, and this is the pattern I see most often. We govern the new and the small. We wave through the old and the large. The biggest items in a budget are frequently the ones that have gone longest without anyone asking the simplest question: Would we still choose this if we were deciding today?

Consider Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s largest retailers and an Origina client. It faced the kind of routine three-year IBM software renewal that usually gets signed without much debate. Under pressure to cut costs, the company paused to ask a question most organizations skip: Was renewing on the vendor’s terms the only option? It wasn’t. Rather than accept the default, Sainsbury’s moved support for its critical IBM systems, the ones running through its busiest trading periods, to independent support. The company saved tens of millions in the process. Renewal was only one path, and no one had thought to challenge it before.

HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT

The explanation about why no one questions renewals is structural, with a little human nature mixed in. A decision made years ago carries the authority of a decision already made. The people who approved it have usually moved on. Reopening it can feel like second-guessing them, or like conceding that the company has been spending badly for a long time. So the assumption behind the original outlay hardens into settled fact, even as the business around it changes. Psychologists call this trap “escalation of commitment”: The more we have already poured into something, the harder we find it to stop.

The costliest offenders hide in plain sight. They are seldom the eye-catching new initiative that draws the board’s attention. They are the license that renews every year, the platform everything else now leans on, and the maintenance line no one has examined since the sponsor who signed it retired. Their familiarity is precisely what protects them. We treat longevity as proof that something still earns its place.

To be clear, some of your oldest systems are also your most valuable, precisely because they have worked for years. Replacing them would introduce risk without creating value. Stability has a real return, and chasing change for its own sake destroys as much value as clinging to the wrong thing. The failure is keeping it by default, without ever testing whether the choice still makes sense. Inheritance and inertia are not strategies.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

The irony is that even the projects we do watch closely can disappoint. In a 2024 study of large-scale technology programs, Boston Consulting Group found that only 30% of these programs delivered fully on time, on budget, and on scope. Nearly one in five never delivered the originally promised scope. Most telling for anyone running a budget, BCG attributes those failures less to technical complexity than to weak, poorly structured governance. And these are the initiatives under the brightest lights. The commitments nobody reopens gain no such reckoning at all.

The answer is to aim scrutiny where the money actually sits. A few questions force the issue:

• Would we start this today? If the honest answer is no, the only question left is how to stop quickly and safely.
• Who owns the assumption behind it? Every large commitment rests on a belief about the world. Name it, then test whether it still holds.
• Is stopping as respectable as starting? People build careers by launching things, not by closing them. Until ending a project is as legitimate as beginning one, no one will do it.
• When did we last re-underwrite this? Treat your biggest commitments the way a bank treats a loan: Review them on a schedule, on their merits, as if the decision were being made fresh.

Good governance means refusing to let anything become permanent simply because it has lasted. The most valuable question in any technology budget is the one almost no one is rewarded for asking, so ask it anyway: Would we choose this again?

If you cannot answer with confidence, you are no longer in control of the spending: It is in control of you.

Tomás O’Leary is CEO and founder of Origina.