ROI doubts and data gaps erode Australian tech leaders' decision confidence

In boardrooms across the country, one question keeps surfacing: is our expanding technology budget translating into results and business value? As 75% of Australian organisations indicate that their technology budgets will increase into 2026, CTOs and technology departments face renewed pressure to convert that spend into tangible outcomes that drive business value.

However, industry confidence is in decline as technology leaders grapple with the intangibility of technology investments, with ROI uncertainties and data transparency challenges creating doubt around critical investment decisions.

Australian leaders falling behind on confidence

The findings from the Apptio 2026 Technology Investment Management Report reinforce this reality. The survey of technology leaders revealed that Australian decision-makers reported lower confidence in investment decisions compared to counterparts across Europe and the US. As many as 88% of Australian tech leaders report that ROI uncertainty alone is enough to give them pause — putting our industry at risk of falling behind the global standard.

Greater accountability and transparency are needed to effectively translate technology investments into tangible business outcomes and value. When teams share a single, defensible source of truth, decisions speed up, funding follows value, and innovation scales responsibly. But many leaders in Australia still wrestle with disconnected silos or unreliable data, making it harder to realise the value their technology investments are capable of delivering.

Finance meets function: bridging cross-departmental priorities

Investment ROI is increasingly coming up in discussions, but when financial and operational insights remain fragmented, decision-making slows and executive trust erodes.

The challenge isn’t funding technology. In fact, 75% of survey respondents in Australia reported plans to increase IT and software investment in 2026. The challenge for technology leaders lies in defending and directing technology investments with clarity.

Where businesses often fall short is a lack of effective tools and frameworks to support timely assessment of investment impacts. Many organisations still rely on manual, disconnected processes that create a false sense of control without delivering meaningful insights to inform future investment decisions.

In fact, according to the research, as few as 18% of Australian organisations use a purpose-built ITFM platform to track the value of their technology investments — nearly half the global average. Instead, Australian businesses heavily favour ERP systems, with 68% of organisations continuing to operate with legacy reporting systems.

The growing gap: cloud and AI economics outpace governance

The race for widespread AI adoption to automate and innovate across organisational functions, without effective evaluative frameworks in place, risks putting Australian business confidence further behind. As businesses scale their investment into AI and supporting infrastructure to accommodate the needs of complex business networks, they risk creating inefficiencies with functional overlap. Investment in effective management forms a critical part of the preparation process for small, medium and large business operators as they look to build successful enterprises.

Even more so, as traditional planning and accountability models struggle to keep pace with consumption of AI across the business, leaders are faced with an organisational disconnect. A lack of transparency around cross-departmental investments puts businesses at risk of functional overlap, which not only creates additional costs, but risks siloed data, restricting insight into wider organisational outcomes.

Restoring confidence and credibility in technology leaders

The path forward is enterprise financial intelligence. Technology leaders must integrate an essential data layer into their operations that connects cost, usage and value across IT and finance functions to measure the real outcomes. Connecting the dots requires pragmatic steps to unify insights across the business; modernise IT financial management (ITFM) to enable greater transparency, better IT planning and faster data-backed decisions; and optimise FinOps to unlock greater cloud value and proactively govern AI innovations to drive measurable business outcomes and value.

Amid heightened spend scrutiny, organisations can realise greater value from technology investments and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

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