IT operations infamously consumes the lion’s share of IT budget. According to ZK Research, 78 percent is spent on “running the business,” leaving little for innovation. The accepted narrative is that operations budgets should be cut to free resources for transformation. Instead, our data suggests the answer is to invest in transforming operations itself. On average, respondents have allocated 28 percent of their current IT budget to operational initiatives focused on IT optimisation and issue remediation (see Figure 2). That’s already a significant share—but more than two thirds expect to increase that spend in the next 12 months. Where is this money going? Respondents told us they had big plans: to gather operations data from more areas of their infrastructure (which in many cases involves hardware refresh or implementing a collector service); to perform more analytics (with associated costs for tooling, AI training, services, and people), and to extend automation into more processes and infrastructure areas.