When organizations talk about efficiency, the conversation usually starts in the same place: budgets.
When financial pressure increases, leaders seek ways to cut costs, streamline operations, and “do more with less.” Headcount is closely examined. Discretionary spending is put on hold. Efficiency initiatives are launched quickly with good intentions.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most efficiency efforts focus on where money is being spent, not why work exists in the first place.
That distinction matters more than most organizations realize.
Recently, the U.S. government established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to identify waste, reduce unnecessary spending, improve productivity, and operate more effectively. Regardless of political perspective, the objective itself is hard to argue with. Every organization, public or private, wants to eliminate waste and operate more efficiently.
Yet in practice, many organizations pursuing these same goals make a critical mistake. In the name of efficiency, they remove or underinvest in many of the capabilities best positioned to achieve it.
One of my clients (a government institution) eliminated its Business Relationship Management (BRM) function as part of a DOGE-driven efficiency effort. In doing so, they didn’t reduce waste. They removed the group most capable of finding it.
BRM is not about being agreeable, building relationships for their own sake, or acting as a go-between for the business and IT.
BRM exists to ensure organizations use technology effectively to achieve business outcomes by deliberately identifying opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity, and cost discipline, reducing redundancy, manual effort, and unnecessary spend.
Why IT Rarely Has Time to Find Waste
Most IT organizations operate in a state of chronic overload. Even well-run teams spend the majority of their time responding to demand rather than shaping it: supporting legacy environments, managing incidents, delivering projects with constrained resources, and fielding escalations from every direction.
That reality has consequences.
The biggest opportunities for cost reduction and productivity improvement rarely come from cutting random line items or renegotiating contracts in isolation. They come from understanding how work flows across the organization, where effort is being duplicated, where manual processes persist unnecessarily, and where technology investments overlap without delivering incremental value.
IT, by design, is rarely positioned to step back and examine those patterns deeply. It is accountable for delivery, stability, and responsiveness. Optimizing how the business uses technology is often a secondary concern, not because it isn’t important, but because there simply isn’t the capacity to focus on it consistently.
That gap is not a failure of IT.
It is a structural reality.
How BRM Finds What Other “Efficiency Initiatives” Miss
This is where Business Relationship Management creates value, and where it is most often misunderstood.
BRM is not there to simply observe how the business uses technology; it is there to challenge how work gets done. By understanding business goals, constraints, and operating realities, and by bringing a fresh, cross-functional perspective, BRM helps organizations see opportunities to improve performance, reduce unnecessary spend, and enable better outcomes that are missed when IT is consumed by projects, requests, and escalations.
Because BRMs spend significant time inside business areas, they develop a thorough understanding of how work actually happens day to day. They see how processes operate in practice, not just how they are documented. They see how technology is being used, worked around, duplicated, or underutilized.
That vantage point allows BRM to identify inefficiencies that rarely surface through intake processes or budget reviews.
This often shows up as multiple teams solving the same problem with different tools, manual work persisting long after automation exists, or new spend being approved simply because no one has the context – or mandate – to challenge it.
Often, the savings don’t come from introducing new technology at all. They come from using what the organization already owns more effectively, and from stopping work that no longer adds value.
This is also where BRM naturally partners with functions such as internal audit, finance, process improvement, and enterprise architecture. Not as a compliance or oversight role, but as an optimization capability, connecting insight into how the business operates with technology and process changes that make that work faster, simpler, and more efficient.
In effect, BRM performs the work that efficiency initiatives like DOGE are intended to achieve, but continuously, proactively, and with far more context. It doesn’t wait for a mandate to cut costs. It helps prevent inefficiency from becoming embedded in the first place.
BRM as a Force Multiplier for Organizational Efficiency
When positioned correctly, BRM acts as a force multiplier not just for IT, but for organizational efficiency. BRM is positioned to identify unnecessary costs, avoidable spend, and unrealized productivity – often before they ever show up in a budget review.
This often means connecting dots that are rarely connected in practice: understanding what the business is trying to achieve, how work gets done today, which technologies are in use, and how much those technologies actually cost relative to the value they deliver. In many organizations, no single role is responsible for bringing those perspectives together.
By taking a fresh, cross-functional view, BRM identifies where the business is paying for redundant solutions, relying on manual work that could be automated, or investing in underutilized or misaligned technology. Just as importantly, BRM surfaces opportunities for cost avoidance, preventing new spend by reshaping demand before it turns into another tool, another contract, or another project.
This work happens upstream of IT delivery. And that distinction matters.
Because when inefficiencies are identified and addressed at the business-process and demand level, IT is no longer asked to execute low-value, poorly framed, or unnecessary work. IT’s effectiveness improves as a result because the organization is making better decisions about where to allocate time, money, and technology.
The outcome is tangible: reduced spend, avoided costs, improved productivity, and a clearer line of sight between technology investment and business value. That is what real efficiency looks like—not cutting for the sake of cutting, but improving how the organization operates.
What This Looks Like in Organizations That Get It Right
Organizations that use BRM effectively tend to operate differently.
Demand is shaped instead of simply accepted. Investment decisions are tied to outcomes, not activity. Productivity improves without constant heroics. Waste is addressed through understanding, not mandates.
Most importantly, leadership has greater confidence in where money is being spent and why.
These organizations don’t treat efficiency as a one-time exercise triggered by budget pressure. They treat it as an ongoing discipline built into how work is planned, prioritized, and delivered.
What makes this especially powerful is that this capability doesn’t require a major reorganization, a new initiative, or a new layer of governance. In many organizations, the people, relationships, and access already exist. What’s missing is the mandate and positioning to use BRM deliberately as an efficiency and performance capability, not just a connective one.
A Final Thought…
The question shouldn’t be whether BRM is worth the investment.
The real question is whether you can afford to pursue efficiency, productivity, and cost reduction without a capability designed to understand how your business actually works, and how technology can make that work better.
Many organizations seek efficiency by standing up new initiatives, task forces, or mandates.
Ironically, most already have the capability they need.
They’re just not using it that way.
Cutting BRM to save money is like firing your navigators during a storm because they don’t row the boat.
It may feel efficient in the moment—but it’s a costly mistake.
Author’s Note:
This perspective reflects work we increasingly do with executive teams through dedicated briefings on business-focused IT. These sessions are designed to help leadership teams explore
how IT can operate more strategically, and where capabilities like BRM fit once that shift begins. If this perspective resonates, these are exactly the conversations we explore with leadership teams. Please contact Barkley Consulting Group (https://barkleyconsultinggroup.com) to schedule or discuss an executive briefing.
Jeff Warren is President of Barkley Consulting Group, where he helps IT organizations become more business-focused, strategic, and outcome-driven. His work spans building effective BRM programs, developing high-performing IT and business-facing talent, and strengthening the connection between technology and business strategy to deliver measurable results. A former IT executive with over 40 years of leadership experience, Jeff is widely recognized for helping organizations move beyond structure and roles to fundamentally change how IT partners with the business.
