CEOs prize transformation and reinvention, seeing both as essential to current and future competitiveness. But successful transformation and reinvention are no longer enough, top executives say.
They must happen fast, and their delivery must get faster over time. Speed and agility bring in the top transformation prize.
CIOs are feeling the pressure to expedite transformational work, as the ever-faster churn of customer demands — and the possibility of economic headwinds — further ratchet up the need for speed.
To meet the pace required today, veteran IT executives and advisors offer 12 strategies CIOs can employ to increase their organizational velocity on transformational initiatives.
1. Drop ‘digital’
The term “digital transformation” cropped up more than a decade ago, and it has dominated business and technology agendas ever since.
But Ari Lightman, professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, says it’s time to retire that term — and the mindset it engenders — and instead recognize that the goal is straightforward transformation.
“Transformation is transformation,” says Lightman, author of a forthcoming book on the subject.
Transformation is driven not just by digital initiatives and technologies but also process change, he says. And it’s enabled by organizational elements, such as trust, adequate capacity, and sandbox environments in which to experiment.
“If I’m just saying ‘digital transformation,’ it gives you the false impression that you just have to learn a new technology,” he explains. On the other hand, using just the term “transformation” signals that attention must be given to all the necessary components.
Lightman says that redirected attention helps not only to ensure transformation success but at a faster pace because all components are primed for action when needed.
2. Go all-in with agile
Another way to ensure IT can quickly deliver transformative results is to go all-in with modern approaches, starting with a full embrace of agile development.
The 2024 State of Agile report from Digital.ai found that 71% of organizations use agile in their software development lifecycle but only 11% are “very satisfied” and only 33% are “somewhat satisfied” with their results. Organizational resistance to change and insufficient understanding among leadership were cited as key factors slowing the adoption of agile at scale — and, more important, spoiling the benefits it can bring.
As such, there’s much room for improvement in boosting an organization’s agility and adaptability, and with that, the overall pace of transformation delivery.
“What we need to do as CIOs is very deliberately build processes to be more agile,” says Geoff Neilson, senior vice president of brand, reach, and influence at Info-Tech Research Group, noting that the organizations that win at transformation are those “who can adapt with the most agility.”
3. Shed the red tape
Another way to boost agility and adaptability is to streamline bureaucracy, Neilson says.
“It’s not unusual [for organizations] to take six months to get to a yes, or worse yet, get to a no,” he says, because their governance processes aren’t guardrails but rather “governing by committee.”
Neilson says agile organizations “default to a yes” and have innovative sandboxes where governance provides safeguards without creating “a black hole of approvals and round robins of those who need to discuss and debate.”
4. Create reusable tools and repeatable processes
Kathy Kay, executive vice president and CIO of the Principal Financial Group, is a big believer in the value of creating tools and processes that can be re-used to save time, so much so that she had a cloud enablement team build and deliver such things (from APIs to pipelines) to other technologists who then use them to speed their own work.
“So it’s easier for engineers to build out new environments, it makes it safer and easier to secure, and more consistent, and that enables those teams to do their work more quickly,” Kay explains.
The company’s principal design system provides an illustrative example. According to Kay, it is meant to ensure the Principal’s customers have a consistent experience when interacting with the company regardless of where those customers are located. The system uses various AWS services designed and configured to enable that desired customer experience, Kay says. “When leveraged, it will allow an engineer to quickly build an environment that’s secure and consistent — and to build more quickly than if they had to create it for themselves.”
5. Add more automation and intelligence
CIOs should hunt for opportunities to inject automation and intelligence into their IT tasks to reduce time spent on low-value work, thereby creating more capacity for transformative initiatives.
“One of the gifts that automation and AI bring is more time,” says Mark Sherwood, executive vice president and CIO of Wolters Kluwer, a provider of information, software, and services for tax, accounting, finance, health, and legal professionals. “They free up people so they have more time to invest in innovating.”
The next step, Sherwood says, is harnessing those tools to help with ideation and testing, too — critical steps that can happen faster thanks to AI and generative AI in particular.
TEKsystems CTO Ramasamy Palaniappan agrees, calling AI a productivity enabler.
“Using AI is a faster way to do things, from writing code to having gen AI test and deploy,” he says. “It is helping us to think out of the box, to shrink the software development lifecycle, and increase the pace and agility of digital transformation.”
6. Have an AI governance framework owned by the CIO
AI is ubiquitous in transformation today, says Marc Tanowitz, managing partner for advisory and transformation at digital services firm West Monroe.
Yet that can be a double-edged sword, he says. Advances in intelligence can help reinvent processes, products, and services, but many organizations fail to reap AI benefits because they don’t have the needed quantity or quality of data, the required technology to support AI initiatives, the skills to build or use intelligent systems, or the business cases that will benefit from added intelligence.
As a result, they are less likely to invest in the next idea, Tanowitz says, thus dragging down the pace of transformative work.
“There is nothing that slows down transformation faster than failed AI,” he says.
To avoid that speed bump, Tanowitz advises CIOs to own the AI governance framework, and to ensure the framework establishes ways to pick and prioritize AI initiatives based on business value and establishes metrics to measure ROIs.
7. Foster digitally literacy
CIOs who successfully drive transformation to do in part by educating business unit colleagues on the potential — and limits — of emerging technologies, says Kamales Lardi, author of The Human Side Of Digital Business Transformation.
“A lot of times organizations like to leave tech to the CIO, but that creates multiple challenges. That means the CIO is the only one who has tech literacy, so there’s no one else in the room who can help answer questions like, ‘Are we aggressive enough? Are we right with resource allocation? Is this the best solution for what we want to achieve?’” Lardi says.
Although CIOs have taken the lead in marrying technology solutions to enterprise objectives, Lardi says those who can quickly determine the answers to such questions enjoy a true “collaboration with business leaders and board members and the tech team.”
Lightman also advocates for CIOs to be collaborators, saying they should enable business unit colleagues “to meet their objectives and strategies” through transformation. That means helping them not only identify and develop initiatives but also prioritize and rapidly test them. In that way they can “learn, assess, and get metrics” to help ensure they’re deploying resources to the ideas that deliver rather than being distracted and delayed by those that don’t.
8. Create the right incentives
CIOs who want to move faster must provide incentives to do so, Lightman says.
Too often CIOs’ incentives reward staffers for performing IT mechanics or prioritizing administrative tasks rather than “furthering collaboration with other groups and departments to understand their objectives.”
Lightman’s research has found that many IT teams are curious about the work happening in departments throughout their organizations and want to collaborate more with them yet have no opportunity or incentive to do so.
That not only slows innovation but also leads to “a lot of discontentment and disengagement because people are pigeonholed in their roles,” he says.
Instead CIOs can incent staff based on the percentage of time they work with groups outside IT to further business objectives, he says.
9. Build resiliency
The pace required for successful transformation allows little time to rest, and workers must be ready to keep up, says Ryan Downing, vice president and CIO of enterprise business solutions at Principal Financial Group. To meet that challenge, Downing focuses on endurance, “building a level of resilience.”
This requires evolving the organization’s culture from one that sees change as an occasional event to endure to one that embraces change as an exciting constant, Downing explains.
To do that, Downing ensures workers know the reasons behind changes by communicating the business values they’ll get rather than detailing the technology bits and bytes.
“When we’re driving change, we try to be as transparent as we can,” he adds. “We say, ‘Here we are, here’s where we want to be, and we don’t know the in-between,’ and that allows them to engage and help us come along on the journey together.”
He says the approach is paying off. The company underwent a highly disruptive transformation in 2024 yet surveys found that employee engagement actually went up during the process.
10. Invest in modular architecture
In addition to addressing process and people, transformation leaders also focus on the third part of the PPT framework: technology.
More specifically, they invest in core technologies, architectures, and designs that enable their technologists to quickly deliver whatever transformation the business needs.
In its 2025 CIO Agenda, research firm Garter says high-performing CIOs — who are up to twice as likely to exceed outcome targets on digital initiatives — craft “a compelling platform experience for all technology users across the business, not just those in IT. They prioritize data, integration, and development platforms that make it easier for IT and non-IT technology users to build architecturally sound and secure solutions.”
11. Put customers first
Transformation must deliver outcomes for customers, Lightman says. “If it doesn’t come down to serving customers better, then you have to go back to the drawing board. That’s fundamentally what the organization is there for, to serve customers.”
Another way to speed transformation: Ditch some of the intermediaries that exist between the CIO and the customer, Lardi says.
“I would challenge any CIO on how much time they spend with their customers and how much direct knowledge they get from their customers. In most organizations the touchpoints with customers are the product development teams, marketing and sales teams. CIOs rarely have that touchpoint,” Lardi says. “But one way to accelerate transformation is to understand who the target audience is today and tomorrow, what problems you are trying to solve for them, and what experiences they want, so you’re building solutions for your customers rather than building solutions to be sold.”
CIOs and their IT teams have a plethora of data to gain insights about their customers, Lardi points out. CIOs should also find ways to directly engage customers — something that fits well with the modern work processes, such as human-centered design, that leading CIOs have adopted.
12. Remain flawless on the fundamentals
CIOs must continue to execute the fundamentals flawlessly, because problems with those basics will slow transformation, says Sherwood, the Wolters Kluwer CIO.
“An IT team can’t be taken seriously to move fast if it’s not doing the basic functions well,” Sherwood says.
He points to challenges he encountered while working at a previous company, where business users “were rumbling” about glitches and bugginess in the technology that, although not catastrophic, were annoying and problematic.
Moreover, those issues distracted the business and IT teams from transformative work.
“But once we got those fixed, and we got trust back, we could focus on what more we could do for the business,” Sherwood explains. “It gave us back the ability to be creative and to chase new features.”
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