5 business concepts IT leaders should master

CIOs have heard for years that they can no longer be only technology leaders. They must be business executives, too.

CEOs say as much. CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO survey found that CEOs expect their top IT execs to help the organization achieve revenue growth objectives, identify data-driven business opportunities, reduce spending, enable new plans for customer acquisition and retention, among other objectives.

If CIOs want to deliver on those CEO expectations, they must not only speak the language of business (as they’re often advised to do) but also understand business fundamentals — those key ideas and theories that have become the bedrock lessons of MBA programs and corporate planning.

Many of those business fundamentals are management, executive, and soft skills that CIOs have developed as they advanced their careers. But there are business concepts that bubble up based on current trends and present-day realities, and the most effective CIOs are those who understand those constructs enough to work with their colleagues to address them as strategists.

To that point, CIO.com polled analysts, consultants, and CIOs about the must-have business concepts of today. Here’s what made their list.

Domain knowledge

In addition to having broad business acumen, CIOs who excel also understand the workings of each functional area and each area’s drivers and objectives.

That’s not to say that CIOs need to be experts in marketing or sales or have a CPA to engage with finance, says Bhadresh Patel, COO with professional services firm RGP. But they should learn the business basics of the various departments that IT supports and what makes each one tick.

“Domain knowledge around each of the functions is important so they can actually keep up with the conversations; the CIO has to be broad enough and deep enough to stay in the conversations,” says Patel.

The fervor around artificial intelligence illustrates why CIO knowledge of the functional areas within a typical organization is so critical, he adds.

“Everyone in the organization wants AI, and vendors are pushing AI, so the CIO becomes the person who understands the tech landscape and how to connect it with the demands on the business,” Patel says. “A good CIO in the modern day and in the future is the one who understands the business, respects what the business is trying to do, and how the tech supports each area of the business to achieve its goals.”

Business financials

CIOs often talk about delivering returns on their organization’s technology investments, but executive advisers say their financial knowledge must run deeper than that. They advise CIOs to get a good handle on concepts such as cash flow, margins and ratios, growth, revenue versus profit, and so on.

Additionally, several sources highlight the need for CIOs to understand business value creation in particular.

RGP CIO Keith Golden says knowing this concept — “what really brings in the dollars” — is essential for “understanding how technology can unlock opportunities.”

As a CIO, he encourages IT staff to spend time in sales, manufacturing, and service units to understand what and how the company makes money, how it generates profits, and where it produces the highest margins.

He adds, “If you don’t know this, then you can’t be as effective as a CIO as you could be.”

Sanjeev Vohra, chief technology and innovation officer at IT services firm Genpact, has a similar take.

“Business value creation means defining, measuring, and delivering outcomes that matter, with CIOs fluent in turning data into insights that drive results. The shift is from service metrics to business outcomes,” he says.

Vohra says CIOs who understand business value creation are best positioned to deliver IT work that supports the business.

“Too many IT projects fail from misalignment with the business. AI raises the stakes, making business value creation a core concept CIOs must master. Not only does this tie back to the importance of a strong partnership between IT and business, but it also underscores why business value creation must be treated as a core business concept,” he says.

Similarly, Mike Trkay, CIO of FICO, a global analytics firm, calls out the need for IT leaders to understand the specific concepts of customer lifetime value and product profitability.

“CIOs today aren’t just technology leaders but customer-facing business partners for their organization, and in that role we can directly impact growth by understanding and enabling the customer-facing functions. Maybe we have data that the business doesn’t know exists and we can now say, ‘Here’s data that helps us better understand our customer.’ In that way we’re able to mine for opportunities. We are now in a position where we can look at things not just transactionally but strategically. That guides us on our tech investments and helps us align our investments where the revenue is and where the key value to our customers is.”

Market positioning and go-to-market strategies

CIOs must also do more to understand go-to-market (GTM) strategies, Trkay says.

Knowing how the company’s products play in the market — whether they’re high margin, high points of value to customers, differentiators, or lower value but necessary to deliver — helps ensure IT investments match market requirements, he says.

This knowledge is critical for CIOs responsible for delivering technology, digital services, or digital touchpoints directly to customers — an increasingly significant portion of IT leaders, he says.

“Knowing marketing [principles] changes how you need to engineer, create, support, and secure those technology products,” Trkay adds.

Others agree, saying CIOs must understand marketing concepts and go-to-market strategies, because they’re increasingly expected to drive — not just support — business growth, customer experience, and digital innovation.

“CIOs need to know what the market is doing, what their competition is doing, what are their competitors doing to enable their sales teams to be faster and more effective and more efficient, and what trends are happening in technology that can enable that,” Patel says.

Research shows that those CIOs are high-performing leaders who can identify the technology investments that fulfill GTM goals such as customer acquisition, product launches, faster time-to-market, and market differentiation.

Gartner’s 2025 CIO and Technology Executive Survey found that organizations identified as “Digital Vanguards,” where CIOs co-own GTM execution with business leaders, meet business outcome targets for 71% of their digital initiatives. Compare that to the 48% success rate among the general population of organizations.

Change management as a discipline

According to CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO survey, 81% of CIOs agreed that the role is becoming a changemaker, increasingly leading business and technology initiatives, and 82% said they’re more involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their business counterparts.

Too often, however, CIOs focus on shepherding technical changes and skimp on leading the more difficult, yet more important, organizational change that’s required for an IT initiative to be successful, says Eric Bloom, executive director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute.

Research backs up such observations.

In a 2024 CIO survey, professional firm Deloitte found that 54% of CIOs identify as change agents while 46% identified as technical gurus. In announcing the survey findings, Deloitte noted the need for CIOs to get better at leading change.

“The role of the CIO has evolved significantly; merely being the technical expert within the organization is necessary but insufficient,” Anjali Shaikh, managing director and US CIO Program Experience director at Deloitte Consulting LLP, said. “Today’s CIOs may need to primarily be business and people leaders — a stark departure from the role’s expectations three decades ago, which primarily centered on technology delivery. In an era where technology is the backbone of business, tech executives who adapt to change and foster a growth-oriented mindset are likely better positioned to propel their businesses toward competitive edge and innovation.”

Bloom likewise sees the need for CIOs to cultivate a thorough understanding of change management to ensure success.

“True change management is a discipline and skill set. At its best change management requires a combination of emotional intelligence, leadership, and good communication,” he says. “CIOs need to know this discipline today particularly because of AI. AI will change a lot of people’s jobs; jobs will go away, new ones will be created, and it will change organizational structure. CIOs need to know how to lead through all that change.”

Business risk

CIOs listed cybersecurity and risk management as their top priority this year, according to the 2025 CIO Leadership Perspectives survey from Gartner. The survey results marked the fourth consecutive year that CIOs listed cybersecurity and risk management as a No. 1 priority.

Jamil Farshchi, CTO at Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies in the United States, agrees, saying “holistic risk governance” is the most critical business concept leaders must master.

“I’m not talking about ‘technical risk’ or ‘cybersecurity risk’ in a silo. I mean business risk, viewed through the same lens as a CEO and the board of director,” he says. “The best tech leaders are great at managing how tech decisions impact financial performance, market reputation, regulatory exposure, and the ability to innovate.”

He cites his company’s move to passwordless authentication as why and how mastering this concept matters for IT.

“The conventional wisdom is that stronger security has to come with more user friction. We rejected that premise. We know that compromised credentials are the single biggest driver of security incidents — about 80% of them — but also that managing passwords is a constant drag on employee productivity,” he explains. “So we eliminated passwords for our entire 22,000-person workforce. As a result we simultaneously made the most significant leap in risk reduction I’ve ever seen while getting feedback from our employees that the new system was ‘life-changing.’”

RGP CIO Golden also cites the importance of delving deeper into the topic of risk so CIOs can speak knowledgeably with their C-suite colleagues on risk appetite, risk tolerance, and risk mitigation and effectively advise them on how to use technology to successfully address their risk needs.

“IT leaders need to delve into the risks that business unit leaders are concerned about,” he says, stressing the need for CIOs to dig into business risk in general and to dig into the risks that are specific to the various functions within the enterprise — such as legal risk, financial risk, and compliance risk. “As CIOs, we don’t have to live there, but we have to think about what risk means to each of them.”