For several years, a trend has become widespread in many companies: IT budgets have shifted toward business units. Investments are driven by product, marketing, sales, operations and other departments, with a simple logic: fund what is visible, what can be measured quickly, and what “creates value”.
On paper, this makes sense. In reality, it creates an increasingly costly paradox: the CIO organization has less and less budget of its own, even though it still has to fund and execute essential initiatives that are often seen as having no short-term “business value”.
The result is a budget blind spot. And when the invisible is underfunded – obsolescence, technical debt, security, data quality and more – the information system keeps delivering until the day it breaks. When that happens, the bill is rarely “optimized”.
The Real Issue: “Business Value” Is Not the Only Kind of Value
Value is often associated with new features, new journeys, new channels and new products. But an information system does not run on features alone.
It depends on a foundation that is often discreet:
- Obsolescence management: platforms, versions, infrastructure and middleware
- Technical debt reduction: complexity, dependencies and workarounds
- Security: patching, hardening, IAM, segmentation and vulnerabilities
- Resilience and continuity: disaster recovery, business continuity, availability, monitoring and capacity
- Industrialization: automation, standardization, documentation and run operations
- Data quality: master data, rules, traceability and lineage
These initiatives are “invisible” because they do not immediately add a new line to a user screen. Yet they protect the value already created and determine the organization’s ability to deliver tomorrow.
In short: what is not immediately “business-facing” can still be vital to the business.
Obsolescence and Technical Debt: Certain Costs, Not Hypotheses
Obsolescence is not an abstract risk. It is a mechanism:
- vendors end support,
- vulnerabilities accumulate,
- skills become scarce,
- dependencies multiply,
- migrations become longer and riskier.
When these topics are postponed because there is no budget, the organization is not “saving” time. It is taking on debt, with interest. That debt is paid in three ways:
- Higher operating costs: heavier run operations, incidents and workarounds
- Deteriorating time-to-market: slower integrations and more regressions
- Increasing risk: outages, security gaps, non-compliance and difficult audits
When a major incident occurs, everything becomes urgent again. And urgency is always the most expensive scenario.
Data Quality: “Owned” by Business Units, but Rarely Managed
Another key point, and one that is often misunderstood: data is usually “owned” by business units, including definitions, business rules and usage. That is normal. The CIO organization cannot decide alone what an “active customer” or a “valid order” means.
But in many organizations, this ownership remains declarative:
- no truly mandated data owners,
- no allocated time,
- few KPIs,
- difficult trade-offs, often framed as “not a priority”,
- correction work that no one is rewarded for.
As a result, poor data quality becomes a bottleneck everywhere: reporting, CRM, billing, customer experience, AI and more. The CIO organization is left managing the symptoms – reprocessing, patches and complex pipelines – without being able to address the cause.
When data “belongs to the business” but no one operates it, the whole company pays the price, not just IT.
Why This Model Eventually Breaks
When most of the budget is captured by “visible” initiatives, the same weak signals often appear:
- rich product roadmaps, but an eroding foundation,
- IT teams saturated by run operations and emergencies,
- increasingly complex architecture, with exceptions and multiple stacks,
- data and AI projects that struggle because of quality, master data and lineage issues,
- security under pressure, with postponed patches and vulnerability debt,
- overall IT costs that increase without appearing in a single budget line.
The information system may keep delivering for a while. But stability decreases: every new project becomes longer, riskier and more expensive.
How to Rebuild a Sustainable Funding Model
The goal is not to “take the budget back from business units”. The shift toward business-led budgets has good reasons. The challenge is to complement the model so the health of the information system is properly funded.
1. Create a CIO Foundation Budget: IT Health Is Not Optional
Just as companies fund the maintenance of industrial equipment, they must fund the maintenance of the information system: obsolescence, security, resilience, technical debt and cross-functional capabilities.
This budget must be:
- protected, otherwise it becomes an adjustment variable,
- governed, with prioritization based on risk,
- measured, using simple indicators such as obsolescence, vulnerabilities, incidents and debt.
2. Introduce Business + CIO Co-Funding for Hybrid Topics
Many initiatives are mixed by nature: CRM, ERP, data platforms, IAM, MDM, customer master data, integration redesign and more.
A robust model consists of sharing responsibilities:
- business units fund usage value: processes, adoption, change and rules,
- the CIO organization funds durability: architecture, security, operations and resilience.
Above all, there must be a shared arbitration framework that considers ROI, risk, debt and compliance.
3. Move from Declarative Data Governance to Data SLAs
If data is “owned” by business units, it needs concrete management:
- appointed and accountable data owners,
- automated quality rules: controls and alerts,
- a correction process: prioritization, deadlines and validation,
- KPIs embedded into operating rituals, not limited to an annual report.
This is often one of the best investments: more reliable data reduces hidden costs everywhere.
A Simple Checklist to Get Started and Avoid Hitting the Wall
To make the topic actionable quickly, here are three questions to ask:
- What percentage of the information system is at risk of obsolescence within the next 12 to 24 months?
- Do we have a dedicated budget for IT health, and is it tracked as such?
- Who is responsible, on the business side, for the quality of critical data such as customers, products, orders and finance?
If any of these answers is unclear, this is not a technical problem. It is a governance and funding problem.
Conclusion: Funding the Invisible Protects the Visible
The shift of budgets toward business units has accelerated short-term value delivery. But without clear funding for the invisible infrastructure – obsolescence, debt, security and data quality – the organization’s ability to deliver sustainably is weakened.
A healthy information system means:
- faster projects,
- fewer incidents,
- more reliable data and AI usage,
- manageable security,
- sustainable transformation.
At Follow-Us, we help CIO organizations and business teams objectify these topics – risk, debt, obsolescence and data quality – and implement a governance and funding model that avoids the trap of “everything visible, nothing sustainable”.
FAQ
Why do CIO organizations lack their own budget?
Because more and more IT investments are attached to business roadmaps and focused on short-term visible ROI.
What is a CIO foundation budget?
It is a budget dedicated to the health of the information system: obsolescence, security, resilience, technical debt and cross-functional capabilities.
Why is data quality becoming a problem?
Data is often “owned” by business units but insufficiently managed, creating inconsistencies and hidden costs.
What are the risks of underfunding the invisible?
More incidents, lower time-to-market, emergency migrations, vulnerabilities and exploding operating costs.
