Information Week

Successful AI implementation requires treating systems as a living asset that requires continuous monitoring and governance. Too often, IT leaders overlook important qualities such as risk assessment, data quality management and contingency strategies during the planning stages, unveiling hidden costs down the road. In this interview, technologist and educator Daryle Serrant discusses the often-overlooked risks and potential financial fallout associated with implementing artificial intelligence in business environments. Serrant points to real-world examples where well-meaning AI project managers underestimated the time required to maintain high-quality data sets, prepare for regulatory requirements, or run AI complex business solutions. He also provides advice on how to avoid these costly mistakes by continuously monitoring AI technology post-implementation. source

CIOs and CTOs gearing up for 2026 budgeting season find they’re having to adapt to the times. On a macro level, geopolitical unrest is making them cautious in their approach to 2026 budgeting, while rapid AI advances are affecting the tech stack and human capital.  “The amount of change we’re seeing is unprecedented and happening in so many areas. We’ve got all kinds of research that shows the pace [of change] is increasing,” says Bill Briggs, CTO at global professional services network Deloitte, who adds that continued advances in AI’s capability that feel like they happen week to week, certainly quarter to quarter, and year to year.  “There are ways we can invest in architecture and team relationship building to give us more optionality over time, [so we are] able to adapt as [AI] advances and players potentially drop out,” Briggs says.  Meanwhile, the real-world effect of extreme volatility is causing CIOs to diversify their vendor base, as opposed to relying on a single vendor. Their caution extends to any given architecture.  Bill Briggs, Deloitte “[CIOs] know change is coming, which nets out to investing in engineering that gives you fungibility, portability, and the ability to swap out big change over time,” Briggs says.  now tends to be immediate in target areas.   Related:CIOs’ Top Hiring Challenges Today, and How to Solve Them Where CIOs Should Invest  So much competitive advantage is going to whether or not you have full-stack engineering capability with cyber and cloud AI embedded. “Have you invested in tooling and platforms, so your teams don’t have to do everything from environments and pre-configured cloud hosting to the tool chain for your full CI/CD?” Briggs asks.  “It’s basically investing in the platforms and products codifying our IP, industry or functional knowledge to help our clients get outcomes faster,” he continues. “It’s investing in our people to build AI and software capabilities. We’ve been doing it for a long time, but we had a marked increase in investment in the last two or three years, and that’s continuing [in 2026].”  CIO shops are becoming outcome-based, which makes them accountable for what they’re delivering against the value potential, not how many hours were burned.  “The biggest challenge seems to be changing every day, but I think it’s going to be all about balancing long-term vision with near-term execution,” says Sudeep George, CTO at software-delivered AI data company iMerit.  “Frankly, nobody has a very good idea of what’s going to happen in 2026, so everyone’s placing bets,” he continues. “This unpredictability is going to be the nature of the beast, and we have to be ready for that.”  Related:A Tech Leader’s Guide to Reputation Management Speed, trust, and depth of expertise are critical as time-to-value expectations continue to increase. The idea is to have a budget that has contingencies built in so IT can be nimble.  Sudeep George, iMerit A lot of companies are coming up with solutions, but not many of them are production grade, so figuring out that dynamic is important,” George says. “I’m pretty sure most CIOs and CTOs are going to be looking at a research part, figuring out how they’re going to make some strategic bets while keeping a budget set aside for R&D.”  AI Advancement Is Impacting Budgets  Marcia Calleja-Matsko, CIO at insurance brokerage, financial services, and HR consulting firm OneDigital, says her company’s customers may be experiencing economic constraints, but they have to address the real question of how a CIO should budget for AI.  Calleja-Matsko says she and her peers are mostly challenged with how [to] budget for AI, thinking about the compute, all those charges, and what the usage will be into the next year.”  “It’s thinking about the different AI models we’re using and how we can appropriately forecast that, she said, adding that her biggest challenge as she looks to 2026, 2027, and 2028 is really shifting her mindset in terms of budgeting.”  Related:The Power of Optimization: Turning AI into Enterprise Efficiency OneDigital has already started budgeting for 2026, and the budget needs to balance investments with what the company wants to achieve.   “For us, it’s really increasing our employees’ productivity and gaining operational efficiencies,” Calleja-Matsko says. “We’re creating [AI] ‘coworkers’ that cut the amount of time it takes to do research on a client and providing that information within seconds or minutes. That’s really where we’re spending a large portion of our investment as we look into 2026 and 2027.”  Like many CIOs, she’s already working with stakeholders to decide what the organization wants to achieve and backing that up with execution.  OneDigital has an annual prioritization process for vetting all the different requests and projects, then taking a look at the ROI behind it and asking if it’s aligned with the longer-term business strategy.  “Connecting those dots is what’s really helped us say, ‘These are our five initiatives that are going to provide that ROI for us,’ and those business cases get reviewed. We’re starting that as part of this annual prioritization process,” she says.  Though the OneDigital prioritization process itself hasn’t changed, aside from the addition of the business-case review, what the executives think about as part of the process has changed radically.  “AI is really turning things on their heads. We’re still focusing on security, data and analytics investment [and] talent investments,” says Calleja-Matsko. With AI, companies can have tools creating application code so they may not need lower-level software developers anymore, but they would still need senior-level developers.  “One of the things we’re thinking about with AI and that component is what our talent is going to look like in the future and where we invest,” she adds.  For example, OneDigital is looking at how autonomous agents could help make employees more productive so they don’t have to do mundane work. Meanwhile, the company has been growing quickly by acquiring property, casualty and wealth businesses.  Marcia Calleja-Matsko, OneDigital “It has always been important to really make sure my team and I are engaged with

When it comes to selecting solutions for remote work, 86.9% of IT leaders put security ahead of performance. But this level of emphasis on safety opens the door to another problem. Employees who have to work with the burdensome functionality of the software become frustrated with slow applications, submit an increasing number of tickets, and have their overall productivity diminished because of restrictive security protocols. This balancing act can be made easier by using proven methods to provide both high-end safety and reliable usability.   Why Security Is a Top Priority  As technology becomes more advanced and more deeply integrated into the personal and professional life of the average person, threats to online safety also increase (phishing scams, ransomware, etc.). Remote workers are particularly susceptible to being targeted by hackers and their bots. A breach of a remote worker’s security not only means access to their personal information and networks but also puts the companies they work for at risk.   To avoid customer harm, class action lawsuits, and damages to service delivery and product integrity, most businesses are more than willing to invest in prevention instead of having to clean up a disaster after a data breach. Data breaches impact an enterprise’s ability to operate, as well as its public reputation as a safe, reliable company to do business with. Safety mechanisms need to be in place to protect the customers, workers, employee devices, and the company itself. This includes effectively communicating and monitoring compliance with security protocols, such as regular password updates and file management strategies, so that any noncompliance can quickly be investigated and defended against.   Related:The Power of Optimization: Turning AI into Enterprise Efficiency Consequences of Ignoring Performance in a Remote Setup  Neglecting security needs can create major problems for any business. Neglecting the usefulness of a remote working environment can be similarly disastrous. Remote work employees consistently complain about issues such as VPN slowdowns, video buffering, call failures, and poorly running applications. These problems can all stem from stringent security measures in their working systems. Nearly 70% of IT leaders agreed. They admitted that security negatively impacted the performance of their networks.    Without an adequate level of functionality for workers, their ability to perform their jobs decreases. Declining product and service quality creates more dissatisfied customers and disgruntled employees. Customers may get exasperated enough with missed deadlines, slow delivery times, be concerned about transaction security, and have clunky technological experiences to look for other businesses to meet their needs. Workers can get overwhelmed enough to seek work at companies with better technology that will help them perform their jobs in faster, less time-consuming ways.  Related:The Hidden Costs and Risks of AI All human beings have limits to what they can tolerate daily. When workers become increasingly agitated by the state of their digital work environment, they inevitably begin to sidestep or modify protocols to make their work easier to do. This can include security compromises such as accessing company systems on unauthorized devices or sharing files to personal accounts in order to edit them. These steps are taken in an effort to bypass the company security that is causing lag, interruptions, barriers to access, or crashes that derail their work. While these methods may mean that these employees are more likely to meet deadlines, exceed quality expectations, and work more quickly, it also means that the security of the files they are working with is compromised.   Focusing mainly on security means sacrificing the quality of work that attracts and maintains new and old customers. Focusing mainly on performance means sacrificing the security of the work that is done each day. Both extremes can lead to wasted time, extra effort, excess spending, and lowered work quality.  Related:Want to Become a CIO? Here’s What You Need to Know How to Achieve a High-Performing, Secure Work Environment  Safety protocols and usability features must work together, not against one another, to achieve a remote work setup that benefits the company overall. This means employees and customers are satisfied with how the product or service delivery process is managed daily.   Intelligent businesses will consider investing in AI-powered zero-trust solutions, packet loss mitigation strategies, and personal secure access service edge (SASE) models.   AI-powered, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) solutions, such as the one provided by Cloudbrink, that can adapt to utility needs are essential for balancing security and performance related to remote work environments. With AI as the backbone of these kinds of systems, much of the heavy lifting related to monitoring needs and modulating resource allocation is done seamlessly and automatically. Since only 19% of organizations report having full visibility of their performance shortcomings, the supervision of AI fills a major gap in the IT aspects of any business. Yet the cost of hiring additional staff is reduced exponentially.   Packet-loss mitigation technology can help reduce the impact of latency. This makes events such as video calls and webinars smoother, easier to facilitate, and more reliable. Creating a more sophisticated communications environment for clients and staff means increasing productivity and customer satisfaction, raising the potential to earn more revenue as well.   Personalized SASE models can be optimized for individual users. No matter where the user is working from or what their specific role may be, these models provide a level of efficiency unlike anything traditional corporate networks have to offer.   Conclusion  Since both security and performance are so critical to remote work, trying to choose one over the other only results in a multitude of complications for businesses, workers, and customers. There is a new generation of network solutions that prioritize both strong defenses and easy accessibility available via options such as personal SASE and ZTNA. Investing in performance-aware security is what separates floundering, struggling businesses from those that are growing and leading in their industry.   source

Many IT team members and leaders hope to eventually become a chief information officer. Unfortunately, most aspiring CIOs fail to understand that joining the C-suite requires knowledge that extends far beyond technical and team management skills. People come to the CIO role from all walks of life; there’s no one-size-fits-all path, says Sharon Mandell, CIO at Juniper Networks. “Some have technical degrees, others don’t,” she observed in an online interview. “What they all have in common is experience, adaptability, and — most importantly — a strong sense of leadership.” Those who want to become a CIO should take the following steps to make sure they develop the skill sets needed for both the business and technical aspects of the job. Adopt Business Focus on the CIO Path Learn about business operations, advises Mike Vance, executive vice president, professional services at data and technology consulting services firm Resultant, in an email interview. He is also a veteran CIO at Steak ‘n Shake, handbag designer Vera Bradley, and Matilda Jane Clothing. “The path to becoming a CIO is about shifting your mindset from asking ‘How do I build this?’ to ‘Why does the business need this, and how can technology enable it?’” Vance says. He believes the sooner aspiring CIOs begin practicing a business-focused mindset, the better they will fit into a C-level IT role. “Form relationships, ask questions, and observe how each department contributes to the company’s overall strategy,” he suggests. This approach is effective because it expands the individual’s perspective beyond a core technical skillset, Vance says. “CIO hopefuls will then gain a deeper understanding of how the business operates, its strategic objectives, and how their role can contribute to those goals.” Related:The Hidden Costs and Risks of AI Mid-career professionals can begin their journey to the C-level by shifting their focus from technical execution to more strategic contributions, says James L. Norrie, a faculty member and peer mentor at Leaders Beyond, an IT professional learning organization where he heads IT professional development programs. “Seek out cross-functional projects, especially those involving functions like finance, operations, or risk management,” he advises in an email interview. Broaden Essential Skills For a CIO, understanding a single technology area isn’t enough, Juniper’s Mandell says. “The CIO role requires you to operate across a wide spectrum — networking, security, infrastructure, applications, and data.” Meanwhile, understanding the business will help professional staffers prioritize more effectively. Related:Security and Performance: The Balancing Act of Remote Work Potential CIOs also need to sharpen their communication skills and gain a command of organizational dynamics, Norrie says. He recommends developing a deliberate leadership posture that’s aligned with the existing internal corporate culture. “Insights into how to achieve this goal can be found by attending advanced executive education sessions, finding an executive mentor, and mastering the context of internal politics,” he says. Understanding business finance needs and operations is essential, Mandell says. “While you don’t have to be a CFO, you do need to understand how IT’s budget fits into the larger company picture,” she states. “The CIO sits at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and people leadership, so it’s not just about knowing the tech, it’s about helping the company succeed.” Networking is critical for anyone who hopes to move into a C-suite role, says Jon Hill, CEO at The Energists, an energy industry recruiting firm. “At the senior leadership level, openings often aren’t posted to job boards,” he notes in an email interview. “Instead, it’s through professional connections or executive search firms, so connecting with other leaders in the industry can be highly beneficial.” Related:Is Your Organization Ready for AI? Attending executive leadership conferences can be a particularly smart move, Hill says. “They give you a chance to engage face-to-face with executives and other key players in your industry.” Along with making connections, such events also give budding CIOs an opportunity to learn about the job’s business side. Avoiding Common Mistakes The biggest mistake novice CIO job seekers make is focusing too much on technology at the expense of the bigger business picture, Vance says. “Without that broader perspective, it is hard to step into a CIO role successfully.” Overemphasizing technical credentials while underplaying leadership skills is another common mistake. Getting hired at the executive level is about telling a compelling story reflective of your own strategic thinking, business impact, and understanding how to transform IT effectively, Norrie says. Final Thoughts Don’t chase a title, chase impact, Norrie advises. “The most effective CIOs are strategic partners, not internal service providers.” Always remember that CIO is a leadership role, Mandell says. “This means reflecting on what does or doesn’t make you an effective leader, then working to close those gaps and getting clear on why you want the job.” source

A successful AI implementation relies on many factors: Aligning technology with business goals, maintaining continuous improvement cycles, and fostering a culture that embraces innovation and experimentation are all a must. Pre-planning strategies are a must: AI modernization projects should be incremental to minimize disruption, with a priority on high-impact business applications. In this InformationWeek video interview, Thoughtworks Americas CTO Thomas Squeo discusses IT leaders discusses traits of successful AI implementation projects and what companies should consider before AI adoption. Successful AI adopters treat AI as a business-aligned transformation rather than just a technical project, Squeo says, with organization culture factors playing a huge role in success. source

Digital transformation has forever changed the role of the chief information officer, and the role continues to evolve. As a business leader, the CIO must not only collaborate with other departments but also prove the business value the IT department provides.  CIOs have changed the way they’re reporting value because boards and CEOs want to understand the dollar value of what they’re providing, not how many applications were written, for example. While traditional technology-centric metrics remain valuable for IT operations, in the bigger picture, business value is where it’s at.  CIOs are starting to realize that they have to act and operate more as businesspeople and less just as technologists, says Eric Johnson, CIO at digital operations management company PagerDuty. He adds that he has teams that are managing metrics and measuring the value of their individual functions, all the way down to the individual contributor. “But as a CIO, my first question is always, ‘What impact is this specific line item going to make?’”  Reporting is done quarterly, in tandem with business partners, with each team ranking the impact of their projects.   Johnson says that there’s a lot of close coordination with the business about what’s important for them. “Why should [those projects] be prioritized over other things?” he asks. He adds that it’s important to make sure that you have a good operating cadence and operating model around planning, so you can have the highest impact that’s most important to the business. “Real planning [also ensures] that you don’t end up working on urgent things that are unimportant, which is too often the case.”  Related:Organizations Every CIO Should Consider Joining Eric Johnson, PagerDuty Joe Locandro, global CIO, enterprise software support provider Rimini Street, made a point of measuring business value in 2008. He even developed some frameworks that would help him measure it.  “There are three main drivers to value. The first is reducing risk — technical debt, systems outages, and cyber risks. The second category is about operational efficiency and lowering the cost to serve, which requires data and analytics,” says Locandro. “The third one is innovation, [such as] using technology to create value by creating new customer journeys or experiences through mobile apps, B2B customer portals, and lately AI and agentic workflows, which really is a paradigm shift in the way enterprises [and] customers interact in the ecosystem.” He adds that it’s true innovation, because it creates new market segments with products that weren’t there in the past.  Related:Former CISO of Costco, Disney, and Now Exec at Axonius Talks CISO Strategies KPIs and Monitoring Are Key  Though boards and CEOs want to understand the monetary value IT drives, not all value is quantifiable, and not all value derived is cash based. That’s why Rimini Street’s Locandro measures both cash and non-cash benefits.  According to Locandro, value measurement makes the business more disciplined when thinking about the opportunity cost of capital. “You can spend $10 million more on marketing, supply chain optimization, or an IT project, because there’s finite capital in the organization. When you have a CIO with a seat at the executive table who can argue that for every dollar he receives the business will get $1.30 or $1.80 in return, other leaders such as from marketing or production must do the same thing [when competing for budget].”  Early on, Locandro mapped metrics over quarters and years, so he could show the cost/benefit ratio using a Boston grid. One axis was value (low to high). The other was strategic (upper right-hand corner) and compliance (lower right-hand corner).  Locandro says that when you map your portfolio over one, three, or five years, you can see if the investment is moving up the quadrants or still stuck in that same quadrant. It gives an indication of its maturity or the view of it in that organization. “Every company I’ve gone into, when I first get there, I look at the roadmaps [and] reports. It’s all about activity, how busy they are, but what’s the outcome? Changing from activity reporting to outcomes reporting is a paradigm shift. CIOs today must be just as financially and business proficient as technically proficient to understand the cost/benefit ratios and opportunity cost of capital.”  Related:Digitalization — Is It Time for Humans to Intervene? Focus on Outcome Versus Output  Orla Daly, CIO at corporate enterprise learning company Skillsoft, reminds her team often that outcomes are more important than output, so instead of reporting in terms of project delivery, they’re reporting on progress made on the expected impact.  “As we think about our transformation initiatives, there are KPIs set at the beginning which could be around productivity enhancements but also can be more aligned to drive better customer experience, increase revenue, etc.,” says Daly.   Daly says that they have their own operational metrics that are more standard activities around uptime and automation. “We have a dashboard that allows us to see the number of hours we saved through automation, or risk reduction.”  Orla Daly, Skillsoft Marco Bill, CIO at open-source solutions provider Red Hat also makes a point of working closely with the business to define and track business outcomes. He says that instead of just looking at IT metrics in isolation, they work closely with the business to identify key areas where technology can drive tangible improvements. “For example, a significant measure for us is order cycle time. By optimizing our systems and processes, we aim to reduce the time it takes from a customer placing an order to its fulfillment, directly impacting customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. This allows us to clearly demonstrate how our IT initiatives contribute to the organization’s strategic goals.”  Bill meets with business stakeholders to share transparent, data-driven reports that clearly articulate the following:  The IT initiatives undertaken  What IT did to impact the outcome  Benefits to the business, such as a rising customer satisfaction score, improved on-time delivery rates and how those things contributed to increased revenue and/or reduced operational costs.  “These QBRs serve as a

As trade discussions continue with the international community, the US’s doubled tariffs on aluminum and steel went into effect on June 4. Tech leaders now must navigate a confusing landscape where drastic shifts in trade policy could make it harder to procure hardware, perhaps one day software, their organizations need. Further tariffs loom like a Sword of Damocles, though it is unclear what else might take effect or be rescinded under the Trump Administration. Tsvi Gal, head of enterprise technology services, digital informatics and technology solutions, technology division, for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, says it is hard to tell what may be affected the most — medical devices, new drugs, or other areas — in this mercurial climate. “We are in the period of uncertainty and that’s the biggest issue,” he says. “There’s the medical devices themselves, and of course it depends where are they are manufactured, by whom, and so on, but also what are the components that make them.” For example, he says, optics are made in one factory, and then assembled in another place, meaning device development could take place across multiple nations, which may or may not mean confusion on how they might be tariffed. “We don’t know yet under which category the tariffs will happen.” Related:Organizations Every CIO Should Consider Joining Theoretically, Gal says, tariffs could affect all of the categories above. “Basically, it could be a major increase in the cost, again depending on the countries where it’s coming from, and so on and so forth. The question is whether you calculate the cost when you submit it to the US or the cost in the US.” He explains that depending how and where it is calculated, tariffs might not affect the US margin, but only the price sold into the US — maybe. “I don’t have a better answer because we just honestly don’t know,” he says. “But that’s just for the medical devices.” Data, Agentic AI, and the Supply Chain The back-and-forth on tariffs has the potential to disrupt many sectors, but visibility into the supply chain might staunch some of the pain. Kevin O’Marah, co-founder and chief research officer at Zero100, whose expertise lies in supply chain and technology, says resilience is a key focus of the moment at the highest level. “How do I be resilient with that change? From a technology perspective, it always ends up settling into data. Where is the data? How can I trust the data?” When confronted with uncertainty, such as the unknowns of tariffs, switching to alternate resources to avoid higher costs might help, but it can be a difficult and slow process, he says. “These are machines, and vehicles, and containers,” O’Marah says. “They can’t just be moved at lightspeed.” He says professionals in the supply chain try to know where goods are in order to try to get ahead of the anticipated escalation of prices. This can mean turning to data lakes to know where equipment and other resources in the supply chain are, he says. “That’s the way to deal with gaps in the standard flow of materials in the supply chains…That applies to a spare part for a bulldozer; it applies to medicine or an item within a hospital — can I track it down?” Related:Former CISO of Costco, Disney, and Now Exec at Axonius Talks CISO Strategies RFID and other unit-level tracking systems could help with this, he says, as long as the data is consolidated and visible. O’Marah also says the use of agentic AI can be useful on the data front when it comes to addressing potential supply chain issues. “The use of agents to ingest very unstructured data and blend it with structured data has suddenly become really valuable.” Many Moving Parts With technology manufactured in China and other places, it can be tricky to predict what might be affected in the tech supply chain. “So American companies still manufacture major parts of their devices elsewhere,” Gal says. “For example, when there was a shortage of GPUs about a year ago, year and a half ago, it was mainly because of the optical components.” Heavy reliance on China to manufacture those components meant a slowdown from just one country could have broad impact. Related:Digitalization — Is It Time for Humans to Intervene? According to iData Research, some 69% of medical devices marketed within the US are made overseas, That includes China being the source for about 14% of medical devices. Even homegrown medical devices could be affected, given that steel is a material in numerous medical devices. Based on iData Research’s findings, the US imported some $14.9 billion in medical equipment as of May 2024, though it is unclear how much of that would be hit by tariffs. There is potential for something similar to occur with medical devices, Gal says, depending on what the tariffs affect. “Is it the full device or the component? Most likely it will be the full device, because otherwise it’s very hard to follow the trail of where every component is being created,” he says. “But in that case the device themselves could be either assembled outside of the US, then shipped to the US, or they can be assembled in the US.” Such distinctions could make a lot of difference depending on what is included in the language of potential tariffs, from minimal percentages to greater extremes. “Again, we don’t know,” Gal says. “It’s more of a wait and see … I don’t even know if the distributors, the companies that actually distribute both medical devices and the IT devices, know at this point. I think that’s part of the concern.” Necessary Devices There is the potential for tariffs to drive prices up sharply on devices that will be needed no matter what. That may lead to decisive discussions, Gal says. “How much does the patients pay? The HMOs? Everybody will try to take this hot potato and throw it to the next one, but we don’t

With the cloud, AI, and other growing technologies challenging CIOs’ knowledge and management skills, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of emerging trends. Whether it’s providing cost transparency, optimizing budgeting, or showing ITs productivity and revenue value, CIOs need to prove clear returns on their technology investments.  Successful CIOs know that networking with colleagues to gain advice and insights on critical issues is a great way to achieve long-term career success. The fastest and easiest way to network with colleagues is to join a professional organization. Here’s a look at five organizations CIOs should consider joining to boost both their IT knowledge and industry connections.  The TBM Council  The non-profit TBM Council provides resources and community participation to help CIOs meet the increasing challenge of demonstrating critical business value. The council functions as a free, global organization offering tools and best practices to help CIOs align with technology, finance, and business leaders. By providing access to training, certifications, and a community of peers facing similar challenges, the TBM Council’s goal is to help CIOs make data-driven decisions and effectively communicate the value of their work.  Related:Former CISO of Costco, Disney, and Now Exec at Axonius Talks CISO Strategies “TBM enabled us to unify financial and operational data to create a model of IT costs based on a standard taxonomy for cost categorization,” says Susan White, CIO at the BMO Bank of Montreal. ”This allowed the company to move away from spreadsheets, adopting TBM industry-leading allocation rules that no longer relied on assumptions to allocate spend,” she adds. ”We categorized costs into meaningful cost grouping — applications, end-user devices, processes, etcetera — and presented the information in one place. ”  The CIO Professional Network  Established by a former CIO, the CIO Professional Network is a member-driven, member-led, and member-supported community of technology executives seeking ways to network, learn, mentor, and grow in a private, trusted environment.  The organization states that its mission is to offer members a professional network crafted exclusively for technology leaders, providing access to resources that foster meaningful connections within a vibrant, vendor-free community. It adds that members can tap into a rich source of industry-leading insights and collaborative opportunities that are designed to keep CIOs ahead in the fast-paced world of technology leadership.  The CIO Professional Network provides peer-driven insights, case studies, and real-time strategy alignment with other top-level IT leaders, says Jared Bauman, CEO of marketing agency 201 Creative. “Its access to practical, executive-level conversations is unmatched.”  Related:Digitalization — Is It Time for Humans to Intervene? ISACA  ISACA offers a collaborative environment, via local organizations, that allows CIOs to connect to peers and create friendships within the IS/IT community. “It’s a professional network of those with similar interests who collectively support one another to overcome the complexities and challenges that many IS/IT professionals deal with on a daily basis,” says Tony Anscombe, chief cybersecurity evangelist at security technology provider ESET. “The ISACA events are intimate and bring in industry expertise to educate and discuss current topics, providing the opportunity to directly engage and have open meaningful conversations.”  Sponsored by the well-known IT research firm, the Gartner CIO Community aims to connect CIOs into a series of curated events. Gartner promises a highly personalized networking experience with relevant regional insights. “It combines exclusive research with one-on-one analyst access, giving CIOs tailored, high-level support to make strategic decisions quickly and confidently,” Bauman says.  Related:4 Ways Technical Leaders Can Build Smart in Lean Times With 34 branches scattered worldwide, serving over 3,600 CIOs, The Gartner CIO community brings together IT leaders with diverse experiences, backgrounds, and industry classifications. Through peer sharing and collaboration, CIOs from the world’s leading enterprises can share innovative ideas, exchange best practices, contribute forward-looking perspectives, and address critical issues at the forefront of technology. Each community is organized by region and led by C-level experts offering members easy and regular access to enterprise peers.  The MIT Center for Information Systems Research  The MIT Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR) serves as a research center in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT CISR helps CIOs and other IT executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital- and data-driven organizations. Established in 1974, MIT CISR aims to help CIOs meet the challenge of leading dynamic, global, and information-intensive organizations. Through research, teaching, and events, the center also works to stimulate interaction between IT executives, scholars, students, and other relevant individuals.  MIT CISR also aims to help CIOs gain insights into how organizations can effectively realize value from approaches such as digital business transformation, data monetization, business ecosystems, and digital workplaces.  source

Companies have long regarded digitalization as a means to automate operations and eradicate human error, but are we starting to see an inverse truth?  Poorly integrated systems force customers to iteratively reenter information as they get routed from station to station in a phone call.  Automated billing systems bill twice.  Chat functions take you down paths of no return when all you wanted was a simple answer.  When these things happen, systems get blamed and so does IT.  How can CIOs change digital projects so that both humans and digital automation can take their best steps forward?  1. Reimagine digital project engineering so it includes usability  When we think about digital project engineering, the goal is to design hardware and software and ensure that these components fit together into a cohesive system. The focus is on the technical, with only secondary attention being paid to the human usability of the project.   Assumptions going into a digital project are that it is naturally going to make life easier for users and save money for the company, yet consultancies like McKinsey say that there is a 70% failure rate for digital projects.  One contributing factor to digital project failure is usability. Usability problems show up in the excessive abandon rates of automated phone attendants, in websites that have complicated chats, or in internal business process automation that renders everyday work to become more, not less, complex.  Related:Organizations Every CIO Should Consider Joining All of these undesirable outcomes can be avoided if digital project engineering includes human usability upfront.  2. Implement human factors engineering  A jet plane quality assurance expert at a major manufacturer recently explained to me that when jet planes are designed, quality assurance engineers include detailed check-outs of the logistics and instrumentation of the cockpit. The goal is to make flying the plane as intuitive and as easy as possible for pilots. Safety is one goal. Efficiency, effectiveness and usability are others.  Digital project managers can learn from this. They can start by inserting human factors engineering into project design, QA and implementation plans. The questions that should be asked by the project team are: Is an application easy and straightforward to use? Are all field names labeled, self-explanatory, and understandable? Does the flow of each transaction make good business sense? Is screen navigation easy and intuitive? If a user needs help, is a help function available that is populated with relevant information?  Related:Former CISO of Costco, Disney, and Now Exec at Axonius Talks CISO Strategies 3. Perform rigorous exception testing  Human creativity is limitless — and so are the ways that different groups of users use applications. It’s usually the job of the IT QA group and a handful of end users to test and trial run a system before the system goes live. The focus is on finding and resolving technical bugs and glitches. However, the actual usability of an application is seldom on QA checklists — nor are the exceptions to processing that can occur when a broad cross section of humans coming from different environments and experiences begin to use the system. An example is the project team in Philadelphia that designs a system but doesn’t think about the rural customer who lives at a physical address but only gets their mail at a P.O. Box in town. The customer tries to enter their P.O. Box in the billing address field of an online application and gets an error. Why? Because no one in QA thought about the processing exception of an individual having a PO Box for mail and a physical address for where they live.  4. Use a software continuous release methodology for system usability, fixes and enhancements    Even if your QA process is thorough and mindful of all of the exceptions to processing that must be tested, there will still be areas that are overlooked. New software enhancements are also continuously occurring. To keep up with this constant rate of change, which should also include human usability improvements, it’s a sound practice to issue continuous releases of software changes, provided that the changes are thoroughly tested first.  Related:4 Ways Technical Leaders Can Build Smart in Lean Times 5. When feasible, use an Agile development methodology on digital projects  Not all systems and applications are a “fit” for Agile software development, but projects that can be developed with Agile have a jump on usability because humans from diverse areas of the company are continuously interacting with each other during the project build and test phases of a system. These continuous human interactions do not supplant the need to perform extensive exception testing for what human might do, but they do bring the human usability aspect of IT projects into play sooner than they would in traditional software waterfall development, which focuses almost exclusively on technical performance.  Four years ago, the IEEE stated, “Digitalization has greatly facilitated many areas of life and life without it is almost unthinkable today, [but it] should also be considered in which situations digitalization has made life more difficult for modern society.”  When customers can’t get easy answers and users experience fatal errors when trying to process the exceptions that occur in any business, digitalization isn’t working.   CIOs and project leads can rectify this situation by paying more rigorous attention to the human usability of systems.    source

Today’s CIOs move faster than their predecessors given the ever-increasing speed of business and technology innovation. In addition, what’s happening on the geopolitical stage is changing — sometimes intra-daily — creating uncertainty and complicating everything from planning and strategy to evaluation and execution.   “What we see with our clients [and] our work inside our company are things that we cannot control like tariffs and changes to decisions on countries you can and cannot operate from. [These decisions] are happening at alarming frequency with no control,” says Niranjan Ramsunder, UST Niranjan Ramsunder, CTO at digital transformation solutions company UST.  “For example, you find that one day a decision is [made]. Next day it is rolled back. The third day it is coming back. The fourth day it is reduced in impact. Most of our clients’ approach is, ‘Let’s take a breath.’ Maybe we’ll lose some temporary margins, but there is no change of business model until we get clarity about where [the situation] stabilizes.”  Other CIOs are trying to conserve cash as much as possible because they can’t anticipate what’s coming. That can be a death sentence when it comes to smaller businesses.  Bigger companies can weather that storm for some time, Ramsunder says, adding that companies don’t change their prices quickly; they don’t change their services quickly; they don’t change their sourcing of items and services quickly, [and] they are waiting for things to happen. “So the first response to the volatility is, ‘Let us see where it ends. Let me not make any big decision right now. Let me conserve cash. Let me not do a project that completely reimagines my business and let me just see whether I can hold on [to] what I have for some more time and survive because the innovative companies burning cash are struggling.’” Related:Organizations Every CIO Should Consider Joining Because of the current geopolitical climate, UST is being impacted by restrictions on travel visas, and there is concern about whether employees will be stopped at airports.  “All those things are day-to-day issues that are bothering us. That is addressed by let’s wait and see where it goes,” says Ramsunder.  Samir Datt, global technology strategy and architecture leader at global consulting firm Protiviti, also sees hesitation among CIOs when it comes to hiring. On one hand, they want to staff up, and on the other, they’re facing a skills shortage best addressed by variable staffing. Meanwhile, they’re delaying the start date of some projects.  “As a consulting organization, we’re talking about a project that we’re going to help with, and then we’re asked to wait one more month before we start so everything is in order. And then, let’s wait a few more weeks,” says Datt. “Then we start, and there’s a pause for some reason. Similarly on technology purchases, be that a major system implementation or hardware to support it or move to the cloud. There’s that emphasis and more scrutiny on the business value. There’s [also] the question of what happens if we wait. How much longer can we continue the way we are and just see where things shake out in the market?”  Related:Former CISO of Costco, Disney, and Now Exec at Axonius Talks CISO Strategies Samir Datt, Protiviti During the pandemic, many organizations ran Monte Carlo simulations so they could be prepared for several different scenarios. So, instead of having a Plan B, companies had many plans (B, C, D, E, etc.). The unusually high frequency of change in 2025 is proving more difficult to navigate, however.  “Our ability to respond at speed has become the crucial differentiator,” says Ramsunder. “My biggest learning is that my organization is ready to turn on a dime and really respond quickly to those changes, [but] there’s no way I can predict and prepare and be ready, because what we’re doing may be completely different from what we have to do.”  Pandemic Lessons Learned Can Help Now  Related:Digitalization — Is It Time for Humans to Intervene? BlackLine CIO Sumit Johar says the current geopolitical situation is disrupting access to hardware, software, and skill sets, but that organizations are better prepared to navigate the current uncertainty than they were when COVID hit.  “A lot of individuals and companies that I know, are far more prepared this time than they were [during] the COVID time in terms of having the diversity of skill sets and suppliers,” says Johar. “At times I hear about laptops getting stuck at Customs or something that we ordered is taking much longer, but the diversification we built over time is allowing us to at least move things around and run our business. So far, it’s been manageable thanks to all the lessons we learned during COVID times, but you never know. Things are moving so fast, we’re just keeping fingers crossed that it does not get worse.”  When the pandemic hit, CIOs and other leaders were forced to revisit the basics of how to structure their organizations, and the lessons were clear: Organizational structure affects risk, as does the structure of partner relationships.  “You cannot have a single point of dependencies. The diversification we built in the last three or four years since COVID is helping us right now,” says Johar. “My team is far more geographically distributed than it was five years back. The same goes with my supplier landscape. I have more than one supplier for everything I do.”  Meanwhile, Blackline is constantly reevaluating in the context of today’s hyper volatility, and Johar participates in CIO councils, which he considers very important.  Sumit Johar, BlackLine “When it comes to changing dynamics, [such as] AI and driving innovation, there are several things that people like me are dealing with right now. There is an impact on how you hire people, staffing, how to structure your organization,” says Johar. “There is an impact on risk. I’m also responsible within my organization for managing the risk of data, privacy and security, and AI is bringing a new dimension to that risk. It’s