“Not fit for purpose” is one of the most damaging phrases a business says about its own technology function, and it is almost always aimed at the wrong target. When a team hears it as a verdict on their capability, it rarely is. The function is not fit for purpose because the purpose changed, and the design that was built for the old one was never rebuilt for the new.

Sit with that distinction because everything downstream depends on it. A function can be full of capable, committed people and still be unfit for what it is now being asked to do. Those two facts do not contradict each other and in fact, they are the whole problem.

The purpose changed underneath the function

Most mid-sized technology functions were designed to do one job well: keep the business running. They create the availability, support, security, and the systems everyone else depends on. Judged against that purpose, plenty of them are entirely fit. They keep the lights on, and often heroically.

Then the purpose expands, and the business started expecting the same function to drive it forward too: faster decisions, new capability, the AI thing the board read about, or the product feature a competitor just shipped. Nobody re-designed the function to carry the weight of a second job. It got bolted onto the first, competing for the same people and the same hours. So the function that is genuinely fit for running the business is judged unfit for a second job it was never structured to hold.

What we see is not an example of a performance gap, it is a design gap wearing a performance gap’s clothes.

Self funding is a sequence, not a promise

The reason most “IT will pay for itself” claims collapse is that they are sold as a leap of faith with a big cheque attached. Buy the platform, trust the roadmap, wait two years for the return. That is not self-funding. That is a bet.

The version that works runs in a strict order. Get Control first: stop the value leaks and recover the capacity buried in the run. That recovered capacity, and the slack it creates in the budget, funds Get Moving: the platforms, data foundations, and rationalisation the business actually needs. Get Moving in turn makes Get Ahead possible: the AI, the automations, the new capability that shows up on the revenue line rather than the cost line. Each phase earns the next. Nobody is asked to fund stage three before stage one has paid out.

This is the difference between a transformation programme and a self-funding journey. One asks for the money up front and hopes. The other releases the money as it goes and reinvests it deliberately.

Why “fit for purpose” is a trap the moment you say it out loud

The phrase does real harm because of where it points, It points at the people heroically trying to do more with less.

A leader who decides the function is not fit for purpose reaches for people-shaped fixes: replace the leadership, restructure the team, bring in a big systems integrator to show them how it is done. Sometimes one of those is warranted, but usually none of them touch the actual constraint because the constraint was never the people. 

You can replace every name on the org chart and keep the same 80/20 split, because the split is a property of the design, not the roster. That is why “not fit for purpose” so often leads to an expensive change that changes nothing.

What actually makes a function fit for two jobs

Fitness for the modern purpose is not more effort or better people. It is a function deliberately structured to do both jobs at once, which nearly none of them are yet.

The structure of that fitness has a defined shape. Run work that is actively reduced and, where sensible, absorbed by managed capacity, so it stops expanding to fill every hour. Foundations, the data and platforms, that are stable enough that change does not break things and therefore, this expansion does not get avoided. We have watched this happen from the inside. The team did not get better overnight. The design around them did, and their capability finally had room to show.

So what should you do with the phrase?

If you are about to describe your technology function as not fit for purpose, do one thing first: change the object of the sentence.

Ask instead: is this fit for a specific purpose, and was it ever designed for the one we are now judging it against? Then get an honest measure of where the capacity actually goes before you reach for a people-shaped fix. In our experience the number surprises leaders, and it moves the conversation from “who do we replace” to “what do we redesign.” One of those questions has an expensive, disappointing answer, and the other has a fundable one.

The function is not always broken but it was built for a job you have quietly stopped asking it to do alone. Redesign for both, and “fit for purpose” stops being an accusation and starts being a plan.