Ask the Expert: How CIOs Prove Business Value
CIOs canโt prove business value if they only measure what IT delivered. The harder question is whether the organisation changed behaviour, adopted the tool, and captured the intended benefit. That means value cases need an explicit owner outside IT, a baseline, and a decision on who can pause, re-scope, or retire work when the expected outcome is no longer credible.
Shadow IT should be treated as an operating-model signal, not just a control problem. If business teams are buying or building around IT, leadership should ask what demand is not being met, which approval paths are too slow, and where governance is blocking useful experimentation. The management implication is uncomfortable but important: tighter control alone can increase hidden spending, while selective delegation can improve both speed and visibility.
AI and digital initiatives also change the economics of proof. Benefits often arrive in stages, so funding and review cycles should be designed around milestones rather than end-state promises. For CIOs, that creates a trade-off between maintaining strategic coherence and allowing small, reversible bets. The practical test is whether portfolio reviews track leading indicators such as adoption, cycle-time reduction, and decision qualityโnot just project status.
The next question for executives is where the accountability sits. If the CFO and business sponsor own the outcome, IT can stop being the sole claimant of success or failure. If not, value reports will keep describing activity rather than impact. A useful management discipline is to ask: what decision changed, who changed it, and what measurable business result followed?
Married to The Business: Solid Partnerships a Must
According to Ringman, strong relationships with other organizational leaders help alleviate the budget pressures CIOs and CTOs face. But effective business-IT parentships require CIOs to understand the business in order to drive value across the organization. “It’s like being married. You both come together and bring 50%. It isn’t one part of the organization bringing 100%, or even 75%,” Ringman said. He also emphasized that understanding what shadow IT is occurring within the company is useful to — not as a negative but as an opportunity. In fact, finding shadow IT in the organization is “super cool,” Ringman said, because it indicates that the business has recognized a problem and identified a solution. “It shows you where you’re not engaging with the business to help create and drive that value. I seek that stuff out,” Ringman said. He added that he achieves a higher percentage of successful projects by making a lot of small investments and failing fast, versus undertaking big-bang projects.Change Management Is Relentless and Adaptive
The need for change management has always been important, but it has become critical as businesses undergo digital transformation, said EnFi’s Weller. AI amplifies the need for change management — “at a much more rapid pace.” “IT is not only being asked to measure themselves at the end of a project, but also to measure the efficiencies or revenue they’re creating [during the project], while serving as the hyper evaluator of technologies, so that they can connect these two things,” Weller said. “Evaluating technology requires intimate knowledge of the business use cases you’re supporting.” Weller said the large enterprises adept at digital transformation were those that reorganized IT to collaborate with the business, with the aim of capitalizing on specific market opportunities. Now, as enterprises Original Postlanning-the-next-transformation-in-the-shadow-of-ai" target="_self" shape="rect">undergo AI transformation, he said he believes it’s important to embed technologists inside business units, either temporarily based on expertise or installed as part of a hub-and-spoke model. “The companies having more successful AI POCs and trials generally don’t have AI councils. They’re embedding AI expertise in the business team and helping to procure solutions almost as separate nodes that can work independently,” Weller said. The approach is top-down versus bottom-up to ensure a strategic impact, while also being intentionally incremental. Specifically, this requires a clear mandate — not just executive buy-in, but the vision and structure to make it happen. “It’s no longer massive implementations across teams. It’s being intentionally incremental, starting with very small, practical use cases and expanding that over time,” said Weller, whose two-week sprints have evolved into a mandated assessment of impact every three days. Doing this aligns business and IT leaders. It also helped them articulate the end-state goal for a sprint. “I think those three-day cycles help the team reevaluate — should we keep going? Are we getting closer? Are there new decisions? What did we learn from this new thing? It also allows you to decide if there’s something new coming, [whether] we should pause for a moment and see what that is. You can also make new decisions,” Weller said.Expect Chaos, Behave Accordingly
Many external factors affect the value of IT, from the vendors and solutions selected to regulatory changes, shifts in market conditions, and technology innovation. To cut through the chaos, Preply’s Voloshyn emphasized that data helps. For example, last year, everyone at Preply was excited about the new enterprise AI tools they would be able to use, he said. As part of the project, Preply partnered with OpenAI to assess the impact of the tools on productivity. By calculating the time saved by using OpenAI across different departments in its first year after deployment, it was possible to predict the total amount of money that could be saved. Money talks. “The easiest way to have a common denominator [between IT and the business] is to talk about what [a project] will cost and what value it will bring to the business, without getting into the technical details,” said Voloshyn, echoing the common refrain from our other experts: “If you want to impact the business, you should understand how the business works.” One of his biggest internal partners is the CFO, with whom Voloshyn does long-term planning. Having a shared language facilitates more effective collaboration, resulting in a shared vision and roadmap. While the details can change over time, such as which AI company is the “leading vendor,” there is general agreement between Voloshyn and the CFO on longer-term investment, so that the appropriate investments can be made in technology and workforce upskilling. “It’s a bit of an art to remain operationally effective and still strategic. One of the most important things is to stay agile and human-centered, because with all this automation and changes we see with AI, human connection will become an even more valuable element of how organizations operate,” Voloshyn said.Enjoyed this article? Sign up for our newsletter to receive regular insights and stay connected.