Three years ago, writing ‘digital transformation’ on a board agenda was enough to unlock a budget. Today, those same two words generate questions. This shift is not accidental. As cheap money evaporates and borrowing costs rise globally, executive teams have stopped reading vision decks and started demanding return tables instead. The problem is this: many mid-sized Turkish companies spent the last few years stacking a dozen loosely connected digital initiatives under the same transformation umbrella. Some of those projects produced real efficiency gains; a large share served mainly as conference-room slides. In an environment where inflation is pressing record highs and every TL of spending carries a foreign-exchange cost — most cloud subscriptions are dollar-denominated — the difference between those two groups is no longer an academic question.My core argument is a deliberate provocation: most digital transformation portfolios survived the low-interest-rate era under the shelter of the word ‘innovation.’ That shelter no longer holds. If a project cannot demonstrate a measurable financial contribution — reduced stock-holding days, shorter average collection cycles, lower per-unit logistics cost — then the resources it consumes every month could generate higher returns somewhere else. Retreating behind ‘long-term strategic value’ when a direct question arrives does not save the project; it only postpones the decision. And in this environment, postponement carries its own cost.Consider a representative but realistic scenario: a mid-sized retail chain headquartered in Ankara, 375 employees, eight cities, four digital initiatives launched between 2019 and 2021 — a customer loyalty app, a warehouse automation module, a social media analytics subscription, and a full e-commerce rebuild. The entire portfolio was managed through cloud subscriptions and outsourced services, with total annual foreign-currency spend exceeding $420,000. By early 2022, the TL equivalent of that figure had grown to roughly two and a half times what it was when the projects were approved. The CFO’s spreadsheet showed four active projects; it did not show which project had contributed how much to the business. The loyalty app was running — customer counts were up — but nobody could say with confidence whether that growth came from the app or from new store openings. That ambiguity was tolerable in 2020. In 2022, it is not.This measurement gap is not one company’s failure; it is a structural weakness across Turkish SME digital portfolios. When a project touches multiple business units simultaneously, attribution errors accumulate — the impact of one initiative becomes entangled with that of another. But labeling that complexity ‘unsolvable’ and moving on is a management choice with real consequences. Three practical steps can establish minimum accountability without demanding a full-blown analytics infrastructure. First, assign each project a single, project-specific financial metric — not ‘efficiency’ in the abstract, but something concrete: stock turnover days, days sales outstanding, cost per delivery. Second, record the baseline value of that metric at the month the project launched, then update it every six months. Third, if the metric is flat or worsening, ask whether the project design was flawed or whether the original expectation was set incorrectly. Neither answer is comfortable, but both lead somewhere constructive. Continuing without asking is not neutral; it is a choice to keep spending.The hardest part of portfolio discipline is not technical — it is political. In mid-sized Turkish companies, digital projects frequently originate as individual managers’ initiatives. That manager becomes the project’s sponsor, and acknowledging failure feels indistinguishable from personal failure. So the underperforming project remains visible in the portfolio, labeled ‘stabilizing’ or ‘entering Phase 2,’ month after month. This dynamic is real and understandable. But an unexamined portfolio does not grow; it bloats. In a food distribution company I observed in İzmir — roughly 260 employees, Aegean region coverage — three separate reporting-tool subscriptions were running concurrently because each had been initiated by a different director, and none of them was willing to say ‘my tool is redundant.’ The annual cost of those overlapping subscriptions looked negligible in isolation; it looked different as a combined line item. The shift from a culture of project ownership to a culture of value accounting is what forces these costs into daylight.When auditing a portfolio under resource pressure, the most common mistake is applying a flat percentage cut across all projects. Reducing every project’s budget by ten percent keeps the useless ones alive and slows the productive ones down equally. A more defensible approach is to sort the portfolio into three tiers. Projects with measurable, documented contribution continue and receive priority when resources free up. Projects with ambiguous contribution but genuine strategic relevance get a defined measurement plan and a hard review date within six months. Projects that are neither measurable nor clearly strategic do not carry forward into the next budget cycle. Executing this framework requires both data and organizational will — but the framework itself is not complicated. What makes it difficult is that it demands someone in the room be willing to say the uncomfortable thing out loud.Showcase projects will always exist. A pilot launched to signal capability in an emerging space, or an integration maintained to preserve a supplier relationship — some of these are defensible. But there is a line between ‘present in the portfolio’ and ‘contributing to the portfolio,’ and it is the manager’s responsibility to know where each project stands relative to that line. As cloud subscription costs continue to rise in TL terms, as dolar-denominated vendor contracts renew at higher effective rates, knowing which digital investment is actually working is an early warning system — not a luxury. Running a portfolio without that knowledge is not bold; it is expensive. A useful first question for any management team this January: can you name one financial metric for each active digital project, and tell me whether it moved in the right direction last quarter?
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on January 3, 2022. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.