Today’s CIOs are expected to do more than simply enable business value—they’re responsible for driving and accounting for it. Yet, many find that external factors frustrate the level of impact they can achieve, whether it’s shadow IT or the underutilization of deployed systems and software.
To tackle this pressing issue, InformationWeek asked three IT leaders for their takes on how CIOs demonstrate business value. The short answer: calculations can’t be done in a vacuum.
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### Business-IT Partnerships: It’s Like a Marriage
Michael Ringman, CTO at business process outsourcing and AI-powered customer engagement technology solution provider Ibex, underscored the need for strong business relationships. He believes that shadow IT is a litmus test of IT effectiveness.
“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 explained.
He also emphasized that understanding what shadow IT exists within the company is useful—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,” he added.
Ringman further shared his approach to achieving a higher percentage of successful projects: making many small investments and failing fast, rather than undertaking big-bang projects.
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### 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 Scott Weller, CTO of AI-powered credit risk analysis and monitoring company EnFi.
AI amplifies the need for change management—“at a much more rapid pace,” Weller stated. “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.”
“Evaluating technology requires intimate knowledge of the business use cases you’re supporting,” Weller added.
He noted that large enterprises adept at digital transformation reorganized IT to collaborate with the business, aiming to capitalize on specific market opportunities.
Now, as enterprises undergo AI transformation, Weller 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,” he said.
This approach is top-down versus bottom-up to ensure a strategic impact, while also being intentionally incremental. It 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,” Weller emphasized.
Weller’s team evolved from two-week sprints to a mandated assessment of impact every three days. This rhythm aligns business and IT leaders and helps articulate the end-state goal for each 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,” he said.
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### Expect Chaos, Behave Accordingly
Many external factors affect the value of IT—from vendors and solutions selected to regulatory changes, shifts in market conditions, and technology innovation. To cut through the chaos, Dmytro Voloshyn, CTO and co-founder of global language learning marketplace Preply, emphasized that data helps.
For example, last year, everyone at Preply was excited about new enterprise AI tools they would be able to use. 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,” said Voloshyn.
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### Shared Language Enables Collaboration
“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,” Voloshyn said, echoing the common refrain from the 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 the appropriate investments can be made in technology and workforce upskilling.
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### The Balance of Long-Term Planning and Short-Term Agility
“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,” Voloshyn said.
“With all this automation and changes we see with AI, human connection will become an even more valuable element of how organizations operate.”
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In summary, demonstrating business value as a CIO requires strong business relationships, relentless and adaptive change management, data-driven decision-making, and the ability to balance long-term planning with short-term agility. As these IT leaders highlight, success comes from collaboration, understanding the business intimately, and embracing both incremental progress and human-centered approaches in the era of digital and AI transformation.
https://www.informationweek.com/it-management/ask-the-expert-how-cios-prove-business-value