There is an old, slightly worn piece of wisdom, usually attributed to Peter Drucker: you can only manage what you measure. And we took it to heart, diligently, like students cramming at the end of term. We measure our steps and our heart rate, we measure how long and how well we sleep, we measure margin per product, revenue per employee, return on every campaign, down to the third decimal. The CFO knows, almost by heart, what every square metre of office space costs and what every person in sales brings in.
So we have measured everything. Everything, that is, except one thing. And, as these things go, precisely the one that keeps the whole measuring apparatus running: our own IT.
Then someone, usually at the worst possible moment, asks three perfectly simple questions about that same IT, and the room falls silent. How much of it actually comes back to us? Is it good enough? And the question that is least often said out loud: did we ever really need it? Silence, the same kind that descends when the teacher calls on the one student who spent the whole lesson looking out of the window.
The silence is all the stranger given that we are talking about the most expensive and fastest-growing tenant in any company. The world will spend more than five trillion dollars on information technology this year. Five trillion. Enough that if you tried to picture the figure, you would probably give up somewhere around the first zero. Let us simply say: a great deal. And of that great deal, the vast majority of those spending it could not tell you whether a single dollar of it was truly worth spending. We bought something, therefore we did something. That is the whole of the wisdom, and, unfortunately, a wisdom underpinning more corporate budgets than we would care to admit.
To be fair, IT was not always this important. Twenty or thirty years ago it was a support function, the people "in the basement" who fixed the printers and kept the email running. Today the picture is reversed: IT has become the company's nervous system, because every transaction, every piece of customer data and every decision based on analysis passes through it.
It has become, in short, the most vital organ, and the only one we never take in for a check-up.
Why this one in particular? There are several reasons, and each is perfectly reasonable on its own, which is what dangerous things usually are.
The five reasons
The first is language. IT and the business have spent decades talking as though they came from two different continents. IT explains itself in the language of systems and servers; the business side thinks in the language of outcomes and risk. Question and answer slide past each other, and both sides leave the meeting convinced they understood one another, when most often they did not. And so the conversation about the company's most important system stops halfway.
The second is inheritance. Tools accumulate over the years, one on top of another, like geological strata, without anyone ever taking stock of them or questioning them. The consequences show up in the numbers, and they are not encouraging. According to Flexera, companies estimate that close to a third of the money they put into cloud is simply wasted, and some research suggests that up to half of all paid software licences are never actively used by anyone. Gartner, for its part, estimates that in large organisations between 30 and 40 percent of IT spending goes on so-called shadow IT, tools that individuals and teams procure on their own initiative, outside any record. A great deal is being paid for that survives on nothing more than "this is how we have always done it."
The third is how decisions get made. IT decisions are rarely made on the basis of a company's own situation. Things are bought because the competition has them, because a vendor sold the story convincingly, because "everyone is moving to it." Someone else's need is casually adopted as one's own.
The fourth, and by far the most dangerous: IT is noticed only when it fails. While it works, nobody looks at it. Then comes a breach, a system outage or a failed project, and suddenly everyone is looking for someone to blame and calling for a doctor. The price of that silence is not small. According to ITIC, 98 percent of organisations estimate that a single hour of system downtime costs them more than 100,000 dollars, while IBM's 2024 report puts the average cost of one serious data breach at over 4.8 million. These are sums far easier to absorb when they are anticipated than when they arrive unannounced.
This is also where the explanation lies for figures that have puzzled managers for years. Seven out of ten digital transformation projects fail to meet their stated objectives, and this despite full alignment among the leadership team. A well-known Oxford and McKinsey study went a step further: large IT projects run, on average, 45 percent over budget, take longer than planned, and ultimately deliver up to 56 percent less value than expected. How? Most often because the change is set in motion without anyone ever having established the starting point. Treatment, in other words, begins before diagnosis.
And the fifth, the quietest of them all: there is no time series. Even when a company does make the effort to assess the state of its IT, it usually does so once and never again. There is no comparison with last year, no curve showing whether we are moving forward or backward. And without that second point in time it is impossible to answer perhaps the most important question of all: are we genuinely better this year than last, or are we simply spending more?
The organ we never examine
For our own bodies we get a check-up. For finances there is an audit. For a car there is a service interval, even when we could not care less about the car. As a species we learned long ago that catching a problem early is cheaper and smarter than waiting to be caught out by it. Only IT, the nervous system on which a company's survival now depends, never or almost never goes in for a check-up. We remember it only when it starts to hurt. And pain, in IT as in life, always comes due, with interest.
And here is the paradox that takes your breath away: it is precisely the companies that invest most in data about everything else that know the least about their own IT. They have a number for everything, except for themselves. A hypochondriac with an app for every heartbeat, who has never once taken his own pulse.
Where the IT Health Check came from
The idea for the IT Health Check grew out of exactly that gap. The logic is disarmingly simple: if we can run a blood panel on a person in a matter of hours and get a clear reading on dozens of key parameters, why should we not be able to get a similar reading for a company's IT?
The IT Health Check is a platform that uses a structured questionnaire to capture the state of IT across nine key dimensions, broken down into thirty-two sub-dimensions and more than one hundred and seventy questions.
Crucially, those questions are not answered by one person from a single vantage point. People from different parts of the company answer in parallel, so the picture does not depend on any individual's opinion but covers the whole organisation.
On the basis of those answers, the platform does what has eluded companies for years. It gives a clear picture of the current state (As Is) and helps define the desired one (To Be): where we are and where we are heading. It then compares the result against industry standards, so the company sees for the first time not only how it stands against itself, but how it stands against others in its sector. And finally, instead of a raw report nobody reads, it delivers concrete recommendations and initiatives, which turn into projects, and projects into measurable growth.
Here is what really sets this assessment apart: it is quick and simple enough to become a habit. Because the whole process is short, a company can repeat it every year. And the moment it is repeated, the assessment turns from a photograph into a film: a clear curve of progress over time, for each segment of IT separately. So a company sees for the first time not only where it stands today, but whether it is genuinely improving in security, infrastructure or data management, or merely spending more. The findings can be downloaded as a finished PDF or as an Excel file, in which the company can go on working with its own data independently.
In other words, those three questions from the beginning stop being questions met with a shrug and become questions with an answer, backed by a number rather than a feeling.
The point is not the tool
The point, of course, is not the tool. The tool is only a means. The point lies in three quiet changes it makes possible: moving from a feeling to a number, from a one-off assessment to continuous tracking, and from fighting fires to preventing them. Because you cannot repair what has not been diagnosed, nor improve what has not been measured, and the worst diagnosis has always been the one that was never made.
When you add it all up (five trillion dollars a year, seven out of ten failed transformations, projects that deliver half of what they promise, millions lost to a single breach) it turns out that the cheapest investment of all is the one that tells you whether every other investment made any sense.
Let us return, finally, to where we started. We have measured almost everything: our steps, our sleep, our heart rate, our margin per product. Everything, except the system that counts all of it on our behalf. Perhaps that is why the first question every company should be asking itself today is also the simplest:
Do we actually know what state our IT is in, or do we just assume it is fine, because it is still running?
