How Inspire Brands IT serves up innovation at scale

When Arby’s acquired Buffalo Wild Wings in 2018, it became Inspire Brands. It went on to acquire several more restaurant brands, including Jimmy John’s, SONIC Drive-In, and most recently, Dunkin’ Brands, making it the second largest restaurant company in the U.S. The question facing CIO Raghu Sagi when he joined the $14 billion company in…

The hard truth about business-IT alignment

IT, CIOs are frequently advised, needs to be aligned with the business, and alignment, we’re told, is mostly a matter of effective IT governance. Alignment is better than misalignment, I suppose, but in the end it’s weak tea. Add overreliance on IT governance as the means for achieving it and you turn IT into a…

CIO Think Tank Roadmap Report: Reinventing IT

In March and April 2021, CIO held a series of CIO Think Tank discussions—virtual roundtables that brought together 36 IT leaders to unpack one of the most important issues in the enterprise today: IT reinvention. These discussions aimed to identify key issues in reinventing IT to meet today’s rapidly evolving business requirements, and offer a…

AAA automates road service scheduling

The ripple effects the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be fully understood for years if ever, but the boost in digital channel consumption in most sectors has been edifying. With contactless service in high demand, every business is taking the “tap here for X” approach popularized by the sharing economy. You can now add appointments to the…

SAP steps back from S/4HANA-on-Azure preference

Microsoft Azure’s preferred status for hosting S/4HANA appears to be coming to an end. SAP, which has been recommending pairing its ERP suite with Azure as part of a deal it struck with Microsoft, will now encourage customers to host S/4HANA wherever they want. According to SAP, the companies’ Embrace partnership will now refocus on…

5 tips for leading IT through crisis

Technology teams played the parts of corporate superheroes during the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating digital strategies to ensure that their enterprises remained operational. IT leaders get the credit for the exceptional execution, but CIOs know that success is fleeting and stability is tenuous. In fact, 68% of 500 CIOs surveyed say their departments are not completely…

The rise of the cloud data platform

The year 2020 is seared into CIOs’ collective memory as one of the most cataclysmic, consequential years this century. But while the pandemic helped drive digital transformation far beyond anyone’s expectations, make no mistake: This was not the perfect storm we’ve all envisioned. If anything, the unprecedented wave of data-driven deployments last year shined a…