Your IT budget tells me everything about your business strategy. Show me a company spending 80% on maintenance and 20% on innovation, and I'll show you a company that's slowly becoming irrelevant. Show me a company spending 80% on innovation with crumbling infrastructure, and I'll show you a future disaster.
The right balance isn't a formula, it depends entirely on where you're trying to go. Stable industry with thin margins? Maybe 70/30 toward maintenance makes sense. Disrupting your market? You might need to flip that ratio.
But here's what I always tell executives: If you can't articulate why your IT spending matches your business strategy, you don't have an IT strategy. You have a collection of purchases that seemed like good ideas at the time.
Strategic IT leadership means making deliberate choices about where technology enables your competitive advantage, and having the courage to say no to everything else.
How do you balance maintenance vs innovation?
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