IT directors, perfectly correctly, are often asked to justify the apparently huge amounts of expenditure that float under the hood of the socalled ‘discretionary spend’ of an IT department in a firm of lawyers.

With expenditure averaging in excess of 6% of gross revenue, IT often factors as the biggest line item after staff salaries and premises costs. Not surprisingly, therefore, IT is seen as a cost or an overhead element, and needs to justify both its existence and its project methodology.