Do you know what your technology is worth?
You can see what your technology costs. Proving what it returns is harder. The Value Gap Diagnostic gives you an independent answer you can rely on, in five weeks.
- Fixed scope and timeline
- Vendor-independent
- Evidence-graded findings
Expected return climbs. Actual return lags. The difference is the Value Gap.
Different questions.
One defensible answer.
Deal teams, finance leaders, boards and technology leaders each come to the diagnostic with a different question. Choose yours to see what it answers.
The return goes missing in predictable places.
The shortfall between expected and actual return is the Value Gap. It opens at three links in the chain, on almost every investment. It isn't a technology problem. It's a measurement problem.
Select a leak to see how it typically shows up. The diagnostic finds where each one occurs in your estate, and sizes it.
Leak 1: Untracked or duplicated spend. After an acquisition, two business units keep paying for overlapping platforms, and no one owns the renewal decision.
Leak 2: Adoption and process change stall. A CRM goes live on time and hits its adoption targets, but the sales process it was meant to change stays the same.
Leak 3: Benefits never measured or claimed. The business case promised faster processing, but cycle time is never tracked after go-live, so the benefit is never confirmed.
After an acquisition, two business units keep paying for overlapping platforms, and no one owns the renewal decision.
A CRM goes live on time and hits its adoption targets, but the sales process it was meant to change stays the same.
The business case promised faster processing, but cycle time is never tracked after go-live, so the benefit is never confirmed.
The Value Gap Diagnostic.
An independent technology value realisation review that puts a dollar figure on your Value Gap and shows you how to close it.
You keep the full report and roadmap. The method is built on doctoral research into how organisations appraise the value of technology.
What you receive at the end.
From first call to a clear answer in five weeks.
-
Scope
Email Warren. A 30-minute call, then a fixed-scope proposal and the data list. If it isn’t a fit, you’ll know on the call.
Your team’s time: 30 minutes -
Analyse
Your extracts arrive in week one. We do the rest: evidence gathered, findings sized and graded.
Your team’s time: Data extracts in week one, plus a few short interviews -
Deliver
A live workshop, then the full report and roadmap, handed over.
Your team’s time: One workshop
Illustrative only. These three scenarios are hypothetical. They show how findings are structured and graded, not results from client engagements.
Warren Gabryk, Ph.D.
Founding Principal, Axiom Value Partners, Sydney
“For twenty years I’ve been driven by one question: does technology investment deliver a real return, and where?”
Warren has worked that question from every side: as a COO, as an engineering and transformation leader, as an enterprise architect in banking, and in a doctorate on how organisations appraise technology value. Every diagnostic is led by Warren personally, from the first email to the final workshop.
Further reading
For those who want the research behind the diagnostic: why the Value Gap exists, and why it is measurable and recoverable.
Warren Gabryk, Ph.D.
Founding Principal of Axiom Value Partners, based in Sydney. For twenty years Warren has worked on one question: does technology investment deliver a real return, and where?
One question, approached from every side
- 2006–2013Build
Developer to project manager across 30+ capital feasibility and techno-economic modelling engagements.
- 2013–2017Value
Techno-economic valuations, due diligence and financial modelling for listings and fundraising, at a Big Four-affiliated valuations practice.
- 2017–2021Operate
COO of a national telecoms operator, where faster project delivery brought forward contracted revenue, lifting realised revenue 40%. Then director of a 35-person engineering and transformation division.
- 2019–2023Research
Doctorate at the University of Pretoria on appraising the business value of technology. Published in AJIS, PACIS and IEEE.
- 2024–2026Architect
Principal enterprise architect at a major Australian bank, preparing options analysis for executive investment decisions.
- 2026Advise
Founded Axiom Value Partners to bring that research and experience to boards, CFOs and investors.
Education
- PhD, Information SystemsUniversity of Pretoria, 2019–2023. Research focus: the skilful performance of appraising business value created by technology. Published in AJIS, PACIS and IEEE.
- Master of Information TechnologyUniversity of Pretoria
- B.Sc. (Hons) Computer ScienceUniversity of Pretoria
- B.Sc. Information TechnologyUniversity of Pretoria
Deal teams
Private equity and M&A advisors
A technology value number at every point in the deal cycle.
Know whether the technology estate is recoverable value or embedded risk, before capital is committed.
Find capability that can be activated without new capital. A direct input to EBITDA.
Surface value before the process opens, so it lifts the multiple instead of becoming a buyer’s discount.
For M&A advisors: licence exposure, governance gaps and undelivered transformation spend, surfaced early by a party independent of both sides.
An independent, evidence-graded assessment, structured for the investment committee, the information memorandum, or both.
CFOs & finance
Finance leaders
Margin recovery without a new capital programme. The biggest source is usually value already paid for and left unclaimed.
Licensed and deployed, but configuration was never finished.
Overlapping tools from acquisitions and decentralised buying. Recoverable at renewal.
Without a benchmark, renewals run on the vendor’s terms.
A quantified leakage and recovery figure, with actions sequenced as immediate, short-term and strategic. No new capital required.
Boards & investors
Directors and owners
The board isn’t asking whether the technology works. It’s asking whether the investment is performing.
- Delivery status
- Uptime and service levels
- Reports from the team being assessed
- A financial return figure
- Findings graded by evidence
- An independent view of the estate
A report that expresses return on technology investment in terms boards and investors recognise, with a recovery roadmap sequenced by financial impact.
Operators & CIOs
Technology leaders
The challenge is rarely capability. It’s credibility.
- Produced by the team being evaluated
- Always carries that perception
- Easy for a board to discount
- Independent of your team
- Evidence-graded, assumptions explicit
- Yours to present without qualification
The findings are yours to present. The independence is ours to provide.
An externally produced assessment you can take to the board, and a roadmap you can own and execute.
The Value Gap: why the returns never arrived
Technology budgets have never been larger, and that alone has started to worry boards. Not because spend is high, but because so little of it can be traced through to a financial result. Systems get built, projects get closed out on schedule, and the return that justified the business case in the first place quietly fails to show up.
The scale of the shortfall shows up consistently across independent studies: roughly 7 in 10 digital transformation efforts miss their stated objectives, and a review of over 5,400 large IT projects put average realised value at 44 cents for every dollar of benefit expected going in. Neither figure is a fringe result. This is what happens on average. We use the term Value Gap for that cumulative shortfall between what a technology portfolio was projected to return and what it actually has.
It was never really about the technology
The reflex, when a system underperforms, is to blame the system. The research doesn't support that reflex. One review spanning 86 firm-level studies concluded that mismanagement, not the technology itself, is the most consistently overlooked cause of underperformance, and other work tracing return variance across companies found organisational factors, not differences in the software, explaining most of the gap between firms. Put two organisations on the same platform and you can still get two very different financial outcomes. Something other than the technology is doing the work of explaining that difference.
Think of value creation as a chain with three links: money has to become a working asset, the asset has to change how the business operates, and that operational change has to show up in the numbers. Break any one link and the rest of the chain stops mattering. Delivery can still be declared a success. The return simply never shows up on the other end.
Select a leak to see how it typically shows up.
Leak 1: Untracked or duplicated spend. After an acquisition, two business units keep paying for overlapping platforms, and no one owns the renewal decision.
Leak 2: Adoption and process change stall. A CRM goes live on time and hits its adoption targets, but the sales process it was meant to change stays the same.
Leak 3: Benefits never measured or claimed. The business case promised faster processing, but cycle time is never tracked after go-live, so the benefit is never confirmed.
After an acquisition, two business units keep paying for overlapping platforms, and no one owns the renewal decision.
A CRM goes live on time and hits its adoption targets, but the sales process it was meant to change stays the same.
The business case promised faster processing, but cycle time is never tracked after go-live, so the benefit is never confirmed.
The same four leaks, on repeat
None of this is a one-time event that eventually gets fixed. It's closer to a cycle that resets with every new investment.
Spend nobody's tracking piles up. New licences, subscriptions, and shadow tools slip in under governance's radar with every cycle. Some estimates put 10 to 30 percent of total technology spend against outcomes nobody can confirm.
Approval keeps running the same play. Close to half of executives admit to inflating projected benefits to get a business case over the line, and there's no sign that incentive has softened.
Go-live opens a fresh gap, every time. Process changes stall, adoption undershoots, nobody instruments benefit tracking, and the person accountable moves to a new role before any of it gets resolved. The spend already happened. The value never gets collected.
Renewals quietly reset the price upward. With no outside benchmark to push back against, vendors set the terms at every renewal, and the premium compounds year over year.
Large IT projects, measured against plan
Cost and time are tracked closely. Value rarely is.
44¢ of expected value returned for every $1 of benefit promised.
Governance investment and executive attention haven't made much of a dent in these four patterns, which suggests something underneath all of them is going unaddressed. That's what part two picks up.
- Bloch, M., Blumberg, S., & Laartz, J. (2012). Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. Industry research report.
- Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L.M. (1998). Beyond the productivity paradox. Communications of the ACM, 41(8), 49 to 55.
- Schweikl, S., & Obermaier, R. (2020). Lessons from three decades of IT productivity research. Management Review Quarterly, 70(4), 461 to 507.
- Soh, C., & Markus, M.L. (1995). How IT creates business value: A process theory synthesis. ICIS Proceedings.
- Ward, J., Taylor, P., & Bond, P. (1996). Evaluation and realization of IS/IT benefits. European Journal of Information Systems, 4(4), 214 to 225.
Why measuring more does not solve it
Ask most technology leaders what their estate costs and you'll get an answer instantly. Ask what it's returning and the conversation stalls, even at organisations that track a huge amount of operational data. More dashboards rarely close that gap, because the shortfall isn't really about how much you're measuring. It's about whether you're measuring the thing that actually determines financial return.
Going live isn't the same as paying off
Most budget cycles close the moment a system ships, on the assumption that delivery is a reasonable stand-in for value delivered. It isn't, and the gap between the two is arguably the field's most persistent unsolved issue: almost nobody builds the infrastructure to check, after the fact, whether an investment actually produced what it was funded to produce. That absence feeds on itself. Every new business case gets built on top of a track record nobody can actually see, justified by assumptions that were never checked against what really happened last time, so the same mistakes keep resurfacing and the shortfall keeps growing.
Different technology, different mechanism
There's a detail most diagnostic work skips past: technology doesn't create value through one universal pathway. A tool that unlocks a new capability pays off through a different route than one that automates an existing task, and both are different again from something built to reduce risk or enforce a policy. Checking adoption numbers, or even usage numbers, tells you almost nothing about whether that specific value-creating pathway is actually working.
Take a CRM rollout that hits every adoption target on paper and still never moves revenue, because the underlying sales process it was meant to change stayed exactly the same. The programme dashboard is green from end to end. The P&L doesn't move.
Plenty of data, not much proof
This isn't a case of too little information. If anything, most organisations are drowning in operational data about their technology estate and still can't answer the one question that matters, because none of that data was ever connected to the question of return. Cost reporting is thorough. Return reporting barely exists. A synthesis spanning three decades of IT productivity research lands on the same conclusion: underperformance traces back to the organisational conditions surrounding a system far more often than to the system itself. The tools change every few years. This particular failure mode doesn't.
Once you accept that the measurement gap is structural rather than a data shortage, the next move is building an instrument aimed at the right question, which is what part three sets out.
- Kohli, R., & Grover, V. (2008). Business value of IT. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 9(1), 23 to 39.
- Global digital transformation survey (2018). Unlocking success in digital transformations.
- Schweikl, S., & Obermaier, R. (2023). Lost in translation: IT business value research and resource complementarity. Management Review Quarterly, 73(4), 1713 to 1749.
A different instrument for a structural problem
Most reviews stop at "was it built, was it adopted." That's the wrong pair of questions for a portfolio-level answer a board can actually rely on. The question that matters is narrower and harder: what specific mechanism was this technology meant to use to generate financial value, and is that mechanism actually running today? Answering it properly, across an entire estate, takes a purpose-built instrument rather than a more detailed version of the same status report.
Follow the mechanism, not the rollout
Deployment is usually where the assessment stops. A mechanism-first approach keeps going, asking of every asset in the estate: what's the actual pathway by which this is supposed to generate financial return, and is that pathway open? Some assets unlock a capability that didn't exist before. Others automate labour, cut friction, enforce a policy, or protect institutional knowledge, and each of those pathways fails in a different way when it fails. Treating all of them as interchangeable is a big part of why so much value never gets recovered.
Three moments when this stops being optional
Three situations turn this from a good idea into something that needs an answer now.
Pre-exit. Before it's an operating issue, the Value Gap is a valuation issue. Whatever recoverable value gets identified before a sale process opens can be reflected directly in the multiple. The diagnostic pre-empts what a buyer would find, produced by someone with no stake in either side of the deal.
Margin. Recovering value from something already deployed doesn't require new capital or carry delivery risk, because the spend already happened. What's missing is simply a way to find where the chain broke between that spend and the return it was meant to produce.
Board. Being unable to say what the technology estate is actually returning has stopped being acceptable. What's needed is an answer built to survive challenge: evidence graded by strength, assumptions stated up front, findings that can be tested.
None of this has to stay this way
The research doesn't leave much ambiguity here: technology investment underperforms because the conditions that turn spend into financial performance go missing, get mismanaged, or never get measured in the first place, not because the technology itself is faulty. Those conditions can be found, sized, and managed. Once that happens, a technology estate stops behaving like a cost centre that has to keep justifying itself and starts behaving like an asset that produces a measurable return.
The Value Gap isn't a technology problem. It's a measurement problem, and measurement problems can be solved.
Know the range. Understand the assumptions. Close the gap.
Questions worth answering upfront
The things senior buyers usually ask before the first call.
No. Most recoverable value sits inside platforms you've already purchased and licensed. The diagnostic finds it and shows you how to activate it; it doesn't sell you anything new.
No. It's used often in that moment, but just as often by a CFO or operating team who simply wants an honest answer on whether technology spend is earning its keep.
Very little. A set list of data extracts in week one, which the readiness check previews, a handful of short interviews across the engagement, no data migrations, and no ongoing dependency once the findings are handed over.
Yes. It's produced outside of any vendor, integrator, or internal team with a stake in the existing technology estate, so the findings aren't shaped by an incentive to protect or replace anything specific.
Get the number your board can act on.
A 30-minute call about the decision in front of you.
Not ready to talk yet?