SAPinsider Research: Balancing Cost Discipline with Digital Growth in Q2 2026

Technology leaders have found themselves walking a strategic tightrope as they navigate the second quarter of 2026. The SAPinsider Benchmark Report: Technology Leaders’ Strategic Agenda for 2026 reveals a profound contradiction at the heart of the enterprise agenda.

According to the survey, a resounding 70% of technology leaders cite increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs as their absolute top priority for the year. Right behind that, 57% are simultaneously tasked with driving new revenue growth and product innovation.

The Macroeconomic Pressure Cooker

“The need to cut costs this year is also being significantly impacted by external volatility,” says Robert Holland, Chief Research Officer at SAPinsider and author of this benchmark research.

According to the benchmark data, 45% of respondents point to macroeconomic conditions, such as inflation and interest rates, as the most likely factor to disrupt their SAP roadmaps. Consequently, 63% of technology leaders expect these global disruptions to increase pressure to reduce IT and SAP-related costs. Moreover, the default executive reflex to external volatility is often a rigid budget tightening, which creates a severe friction point for the organization and for funding digital transformation.

Redefining the Operating Model

To survive this pressure, leaders must rethink how IT delivers value. Progressive organizations are adopting a platform operating model in which business and engineering teams share joint accountability for outcomes.

Under this model, technology leaders can self-fund innovation by focusing on cross-functional cost discipline and optimizing asset utilization to increase throughput. However, this strategy requires simplification, including prioritizing core deliverables and eliminating non-essential workflows to create capacity for revenue-generating initiatives.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

IT leaders must stop reporting on system performance and start reporting on business impact. Operational improvements such as accelerated cash flow, reduced inventory carrying costs, or shortened days sales outstanding (DSO) are achieved from technical wins such as reduced system latency or cleaner master data. To make this correlation clearer to the board, SAPinsiders must demonstrate how ongoing projects are transforming and improving the business. For example, if an IT leader is implementing SAP Business Data Cloud, they should frame success in terms of how rapidly business analysts can now identify supply chain bottlenecks, not how seamlessly the data was integrated.

Move beyond the mechanical execution of software configuration to actively engineer systemic business value. For SAPinsiders, this means the business value must be demonstrated before the project is kicked off. Challenge stakeholders on the why behind a requested customization. If the feature does not directly support a broader strategic goal, advocate for standard functionality and redirect resources to higher-value initiatives.

Projects lacking a clear, provable payback period are the most vulnerable targets for defunding in Q2 2026. IT leaders should proactively map their current deliverables directly to the P&L. If the current SAP project cannot demonstrate value to the business, for example, in terms of increasing efficiency or driving new revenue growth, they must redesign the scope. Moreover, leaders should pivot away from massive, multi-year transformations in favor of agile, iterative deployments that deliver localized, quantifiable relief to business units immediately.

Want to learn more? Register for SAPinsider’s data-driven webinar on May 5 that will unpack what the benchmark report’s findings mean in practice for technology leaders.