IT is not your trade: that is why it costs you so much

Three Belgian companies in five run their business on an ERP. Almost no small structure can put a figure on what a day of downtime actually costs it. Between those two facts lies a blind spot: IT has become critical infrastructure, yet it is still treated as a line of spending to squeeze. And the only person advising the business owner is often the one with something to sell them. So the real issue is not the budget. It is knowing who, in the room, is defending your interests. First instalment of our series on ICT in SMEs, devoted to information technology.

In a small or medium-sized company, IT occupies a strange place. It carries the business from end to end, order intake, invoicing, stock, the client relationship, payroll, and yet it is rarely a board matter. The Belgian figures leave no ambiguity: according to the 2025 Statbel survey, three companies in five use an ERP, two in five a CRM, three in ten a business intelligence tool. In other words, most companies in the country no longer function without their tools. There lies the paradox. What has become vital is still steered like a side item, by owners who have neither the time nor the training to do it, and who should not have to: it is not their trade.

The cost nobody calculates

Ask a business owner what their IT costs them and they will quote a figure: licences, subscriptions, the maintenance contract, depreciated hardware. That figure is the only visible one, and it is the one they try to reduce. Now ask them what a day without an ERP, without email, without access to client data would cost them. Silence is common. The orders of magnitude circulated by the sector put the cost of an hour of downtime between five hundred and five thousand euros for an SME, depending on activity and size, and the same analysis notes that fewer than one SME in eight can quantify that impact precisely. The problem is not the outage, it will happen eventually. The problem is deciding on a protection budget without ever having calculated the risk it covers. Without that calculation, any IT discussion boils down to haggling over price, and the owner decides blind.

The silent waste

The other half of the subject is less spectacular, and more expensive over time. Gartner's analyses, widely relayed by software management platforms, estimate that around thirty per cent of software spending produces no value: seats paid for staff who have left, licence tiers above actual need, features never switched on. Add to that the duplicates, with an average of several subscriptions doing the same thing under one roof, because every department bought its own. In a large company, that drift dissolves into a wide budget. In an SME of thirty people, it sometimes amounts to the equivalent of a full-time salary. And nobody sees it, because the line is small each month, regular, and never re-examined. IT waste does not announce itself with a shocking invoice. It settles in by accumulation, quietly.

The vendor's structural conflict of interest

Then comes the central question, and it is not a question of morals. When an SME owner has to decide on a new server, a move to the cloud, a new ERP or a strengthening of their security, who do they ask for advice? Most of the time, their IT vendor. That is logical, it is the available and competent counterpart. It is also the one whose revenue depends on the solution they recommend. There is no dishonesty and no bad intent here: a serious vendor does their job well, and that job is to sell and deliver what they master. But their catalogue bounds their advice. They will never spontaneously say that the best decision would be to buy nothing this year, to extend the existing setup for eighteen months, or to pick a product they do not distribute. That is not their role. The imbalance is structural: on one side a party who knows the subject and has an interest in the outcome, on the other a party who does not know the subject and signs.

The same mechanism exists elsewhere and nobody takes offence. You do not ask the dealership salesperson which brand to buy. You do not entrust the audit of the accounts to whoever keeps them. In the IT field, that elementary separation between the one who advises and the one who sells almost never exists in small structures. It is the leading cause of costly decisions, well ahead of technical incompetence.

What changes with a provider whose interest is aligned

The answer is not to distrust vendors, nor to hire an IT specialist the structure cannot fund full time. It is to bring in a competence whose mandate is to defend the company's interest, and nothing else. In practice, that changes four things. The need is written down before looking at offers, which stops the catalogue from defining the problem. The cost is calculated over the full lifetime, migration, training and exit included, and not on the entry price. Contracts are read, in particular the reversibility clauses, the ones that determine whether you can leave in three years without rebuilding your system. Finally, someone measures what was promised, which is often enough to make commitments hold. This is not high-flying technique, it is elementary governance applied to a field that has been deprived of it. And the result reads in both columns at once: less useless spending, less risk of downtime.

Governed infrastructure, not a spending line