Today’s CIOs roles go beyond managing IT, or even information. Increasingly, they are among the key executives driving business change.
As businesses look to modernise and drive efficiencies, effective CIOs are not just responsible for digitisation. They lead on a far broader agenda of business transformation.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with emerging technologies, such as AI. But the truth is, successful CIOs have been delivering modernisation and improving business operations even before the rush to AI.
Cloud computing, remote and flexible working and data-driven automation have been high on the CIO’s agenda for a decade or more. Effective CIOs ensure that both business processes and new technology align with the business’ goals. CIOs, must also ensure that these technologies are secure, reliable and can operate at scale.
But today’s IT leaders have a lot on their plates, from implementing new AI initiatives to managing costs with limited resources and making sure their organisations remain resilient.
As a result, the role of the CIO itself is changing. As many as 84% say they are more involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their business counterparts, according to Foundry’s latest State of the CIO report.
To achieve this increasingly complex and difficult set of tasks, IT leaders need tools and support that help them monitor their systems, measure their results and keep technology projects aligned with the business’ strategic priorities. The role is now about much more than managing IT.
The CIO’s role in a changing world
Businesses continue to invest in technology, despite economic headwinds and geopolitical uncertainty. According to the Foundry State of the CIO report, 69% of IT leaders expect budgets to rise this year.
Some of that money is going to AI, and some to wider technology modernisation initiatives. And CIOs report they are continuing to invest in cybersecurity, as well as in making the business more resilient and sustainable. Here, CIOs are responding directly to a more volatile world.
At the same time, though, data analytics remains one of leaders’ top three priorities for IT spending, as organisations work to align IT with their business vision. When it comes to AI, firms are building capacity for generative AI and agentic technology, and AI PCs are also attracting growing interest.
CIOs are also working hard to ensure that technology supports the business’ workforce and helps colleagues perform their day-to-day tasks as effectively as they can.
Here, there is work to be done. The Work Relationship Index (WRI) from HP found that 74% of workers want better workplace technology, with more than half believing that IT needs to do more to understand their needs.
All this gives CIOs a long, and growing, “to-do” list. But technology investment is never made in isolation. Organisations must ensure digital transformation aligns to business priorities, such as innovation and growth.
Keeping technology and business aligned
In a successful organisation, IT is much more than a support function. It should be a strategic driver for innovation, growth and ultimately, business success. In fact, companies with integrated IT-business strategies outperform others in profitability by 20%, according to research by professional services firm Deloitte.
But aligning technology innovation with business priorities is an ongoing challenge.
CIOs need to modernise architecture, move away from legacy technology and prepare systems and data for AI. They also need to streamline processes, remove friction and ensure that systems can scale as the business grows.
Organisations are looking for operational efficiency and to drive productivity gains. But they also require security and resilience in the face of cyber threats, environmental and geopolitical risks.
And they need systems that are flexible, work across technology stacks, including personal devices, local resources and the cloud, and support a flexible workforce that operates across locations and time zones. This is as much about business agility as it is about technology modernisation.
Nonetheless, these efforts bring a clear return on investment.
IT modernisation and simplification improve productivity as well as employee satisfaction. Forward-looking CIOs take a “people-first” approach to technology.
Effective CIOs help to shape the future of work by ensuring that the workforce is engaged with technology, rather than left behind. Nowhere is this more critical than with AI. AI should make work smoother and more rewarding, as well as drive productivity improvements and improved collaboration. HP’s WRI survey found that 73% of knowledge workers using AI reported that it makes their jobs easier.
But CIOs need to ensure that AI projects work with the business’ goals to add intelligence, not just automation.
To do all this, they need the best tools and the best business insights.
Bolstering the CIO’s toolkit
Increasingly, IT heads can draw on advanced tools that go beyond IT or infrastructure management to help them to deliver business priorities.
CIOs need observability, with detailed data on operational performance, cost, compliance and security. But they also want to monitor the human side of technology.
The “digital employee experience,” or DEX, is about ensuring that everyone in the business has the resources and technology they need to carry out their roles effectively and efficiently.
This is the case whether they are working in the office, on the road or remotely and whether they use local, cloud or SaaS applications — or a combination of them all.
For CIOs, DEX means bringing together a range of tools and data sources, improving end point and device management, increasing visibility for IT operations and gaining better insights into productivity. Research by the Yale Global Business and Society programand HP, for example, found that 45% of CIOs said their IT teams were more productive through using DEX tools, and 89% of IT leaders say that employees are more productive when IT is running well.
HP provides DEX management tools through its Workforce Experience Platform (WXP) and HP Managed Device Services.
WXP uses AI to improve diagnostics and predictive analytics to spot issues before any failures disrupt the workplace. To do this, WXP draws data from 48 million end points and handles 1.9TB of data every day.
This level of analysis speeds up fixes, ensures operational efficiency, helps IT prepare the ground for new and emerging technologies and reduces risk through upgrades and patch management.
Vitally, WXP gives IT teams a single dashboard to monitor the health of systems across the business, bringing all this together into a single, SaaS application.
The technologies are cloud native and OS and vendor agnostic, allowing teams to monitor their entire estates across the life cycle of complex, multi-vendor environments.
The CIO’s role will always be challenging. But, with the right technology partnerships they will be well placed to prepare the business for what’s next.
To learn how HP’s WXP tools help CIOs to keep IT aligned with business goals, click here.