When business decisions get made without IT involved, they often cost more than anyone expects. Not because the decision was careless, but because the person who could have priced the downstream consequences wasn’t asked.

Here’s what that looked like in a job I held early in my career.

I was the on-site IT administrator for an call-center style business, roughly 75 people in the building. My boss, the IT manager, sat at corporate on the other side of the country. The phone system was deployed before I was hired, and it ran at maybe half its intended functionality.

The reports started right away. Dropped calls. Callers who couldn’t get connected. People dialing in and reaching a recording that told them the number was no longer in service, at a company that had been in business for more than twenty years and lived on inbound calls.

Every time I escalated it, I got the same answer. My boss had a phrase he liked: PICNIC. “Problem In Chair, Not In Computer”. The system had been deployed correctly, so the fault had to be the user. That was the end of the conversation, over and over, for about six months.

The problems were real and widespread. One small example: a routing table had never been updated, so anyone calling from one major carrier’s network hit the not-in-service message. That wasn’t a user holding the handset wrong. That was a segment of the customer base being told the company had shut its doors. 

So I stopped arguing about the technology and started building a business case instead.

I found out the CEO was coming to town. I got approval from the vice president who hired me to put time on his calendar, and I had about a month to prepare. I tracked every reported call issue and every dropped call, then extrapolated the cost using staff time and salaries. What did it cost this company, annually, to operate a phone system that worked half the time?

I brought him one pie chart and one sentence: this is what it costs annually to support our broken phone system.

Inside of a few minutes he asked what I needed. I told him I needed a subject matter expert brought in to fix it properly. He approved it on the spot.

Nothing about the technical facts changed that day. The routing was broken before that meeting and it was broken during it. What changed is that the problem finally got expressed in the only unit that reaches an executive: money.

What I take from it

The failure in that story didn’t start with leadership. It started inside IT. When an IT department answers real reports with “it’s the user,” it teaches the organization that IT is not where you go for help.

That lesson spreads. End users stop filing tickets and build workarounds instead. Their managers stop escalating. And eventually the executives stop routing decisions through IT altogether, because IT hasn’t been useful in that conversation for years. Nobody announces any of this. There’s no meeting where confidence gets withdrawn. It just drains, and IT often never learns it happened, because the ticket queue still looks healthy.

If you’re a CFO or an owner wondering whether that’s happening in your company, the signs aren’t in a report. They’re in how people behave:

Do you put off opening a ticket because you already know how it’s going to go?

Do you hear about problems from your staff that were never reported to IT at all?

When issues do get reported, does the first response explain why it isn’t IT’s problem?

Are departments buying their own tools and signing their own vendor contracts, and does that feel normal?

None of those are technology problems. They’re all signals that your organization has quietly stopped trusting the function that’s supposed to be watching your technology spend.

Where it shows up on the P&L

This is the part that matters to a finance leader, because the cost doesn’t announce itself either.

In Zylo’s 2025 enterprise data, IT directly owned only 26.1 percent of SaaS spending and 15.9 percent of the applications in use, both down from three years earlier. Gartner reported in November 2025 that 79 percent of technology purchases result in regret.

Decentralized purchasing is not evidence of lost confidence by itself. In many companies, departments are expected to select the tools closest to their work. The financial problem begins when nobody is responsible for seeing the whole picture before those decisions are made.

Each purchase may make sense on its own. Across the company, however, they can become overlapping applications, disconnected contracts, weak negotiating leverage, integration costs, and recurring subscriptions that nobody manages as a single portfolio.

When confidence in IT has already drained away, that is where the cost appears. Departments keep solving the problems in front of them, but nobody is positioned to price what those individual decisions create together.

The part worth having a conversation about

If this is happening in your company, it probably doesn’t mean your IT team is bad or your MSP is failing. It usually means nobody owns the job of translating technology into business and financial terms before a decision gets made.

In a large company, that’s a CIO. In most small and mid-sized companies, that seat doesn’t exist, so the translation never happens and the cost stays invisible until something forces it into view.

Someone in that seat catches the problem I had to build a month-long case to prove. And they catch it before it’s costing you money instead of after.