One chief information officer who seems to have created his own luck, in the example of rule five of our budget maximising tips, is Paul Farmer, head of IT at Premiership football club Arsenal.

He has just overseen a major expansion of the club’s IT infrastructure as part of the move from its historic Highbury site to a new home at the Emirates stadium 500 metres away – a £450m project. ‘The IT budget has significantly increased on the management side as we have rolled out the new network, but all within budgetary constraints,’ he says.

Specifically, the club committed £16m as fixed cost for the new system. The total comprises 560 servers instead of 20, 500 networked electronic point of sale devices, and a new network that includes feeds to some 440 HDTV video replay screens in the stadium, all managed by a CA Unicenter management suite.

New hospitality and ticketing applications have also been purchased, as the Emirates site offers much greater entertainment and dining options than Highbury. Arsenal is also looking at contactless payment options in the near future for clients of the site’s restaurants and bars.

It is a long way from the much simpler technology set-up at the old ground. ‘This is now one of the most advanced stadiums in the world, technology-wise,’ says Farmer. ‘IT is as important here now as it is in any other commercial enterprise.’

At the same time, Farmer is keen to note that the IT maintenance budget ‘isn’t huge’. He and his team manage some 1,000 devices and a complex set of new applications and databases, but with the same headcount as before.

‘The budget is about right, to be honest,’ he says. ‘Of course every year there will be challenges, there will be new versions of technology that need to be dealt with. But for an IT manager the important thing is to work within the budget the business sets – or have a very good reason your boss can understand if you need to change it.’