CIOs rethink IT’s operating model to deliver better business outcomes

The IT department at Unum Group had a product management structure and worked in an agile delivery model.

This operating model gave IT teams and the company wins by rapidly delivering what they call “investment capabilities” that were aligned to the business.

But Shelia Anderson, who became executive vice president and chief information and digital officer in May 2025, saw room for improvement. She wanted to fine-tune her department’s operating structure to ensure investments deliver returns.

“There wasn’t a great correlation between those investments and that value recognition. So the part of it that needed some work was achieving value recognition in the business and making sure there was accountability for that,” Anderson says.

She also wanted accountability for improving time-to-value for investments, whether that value stemmed from productivity gains, improving customer experiences, or some other objective.

To do that, Anderson adopted a value stream model to analyze and optimize the end-to-end experience across each value chain within Unum Group, a provider of workplace benefits and services, including disability insurance, life insurance, and supplemental health products.

With that model shift, the company’s product-based approach became a business-owned one. Each value stream is now owned by a business leader, with the product management team associated with that value stream now reporting to that owner.

The core IT team assigned to each value stream includes a customer experience professional, a data lead, and an architecture lead. The team uses agile practices to deliver products along with product improvements, as products are part of the value stream.

“In insurance we have a lot of processes; products are within the larger processes,” Anderson explains, “and you have multiple processes that sit within a journey, so most of our products are within a value stream.”

Furthermore, the value stream model facilitates IT and business function collaboration to “make decisions around what we’re solving for and what are we going to deliver in this round of iteration,” she says. It also enables Unum Group to deliver end-to-end process improvements and change management as part of the deliverables, and measure the value delivered, she adds.

“The value stream concept is truly wrapping those all together,” Anderson says.

Rethinking the IT operating model

Anderson’s overhaul of the IT strategy at Unum Group showcases how CIOs are rethinking the IT operating model.

Many IT leaders are moving from traditional silos — security, development, support, etc. — to groupings designed around products, value streams, journeys, and customer lifecycles.

And they are doing so for several reasons, says Amar Aswatha, senior vice president for global business engineering at consulting and services firm CGI. To start, they have found that IT isn’t getting the business what it needs when it needs it. They have also found that IT’s work costs too much — “efficiency is slow as is productivity,” Aswatha says. And they are coming to realize that IT as traditionally configured can’t keep up with the pace of technology change and innovation.

As a result, CIOs are finding that a traditional structure focused on outputs (the delivery of a project, for example) instead of outcomes (for example, a specific, measurable improvement in business productivity) won’t get the business where it wants to go.

“So today CIOs are thinking about how to build a level of adaptability and agility in their operations model, and they’re thinking about how to build an organization that is continuously learning what’s working, where are the bottlenecks and points of frictions, and how they can get earlier signals on what’s not working so they can make adaptive changes,” says Fiona Mark, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Ken Spangler, an instructor at Carnegie Mellon University’s CIDO Program, sees a trend toward organizing IT operations in a hybrid centralized-federated structure organized around products, domains, or capabilities. Here, there are centralized platforms, but enablement of those platforms is federated. For example, IT creates and maintains AI as a platform (the centralized component) but has IT working in business-facing teams to enable the various uses of the AI platform to deliver business value (the federated part).

The centralized IT work includes engineering and security teams, Spangler says. Product teams, which include product owners and business roles, support the federated work. CIOs ensure there’s a governance structure to manage both sides.

“In the AI era, it’s about product, platform, and governance: product for speed, platform for scale, and governance for control and risk management,” adds Spangler, who formerly served as executive vice president and CIO of FedEx Global Operations Technology.

Making the shift

For Anderson, Unum’s shift to a value stream model has required “a reimagining for roles” within the IT department as well as the expectations for those roles, she says. It also has IT teams thinking about the next evolution of agile and how they’ll use it to improve the work they’re aiming to do.

Sharing possibilities give Anderson the opportunity to leverage that centralized-federated approach within this value stream model as well. “There are some components of a value stream that could be shared,” she notes, pointing to the company’s data layer and integration layers that also exist to enable and support the products that are part of the value stream.

At Unum, teams are no longer static, with some IT workers assigned to multiple value steam core teams, Anderson says. To support IT professionals working in this new value stream model, Anderson will likely also adopt a chapter model, where IT employees are organized by discipline. That way chapter members who work on different value stream teams can come together to develop skills, foster expertise, define standards, and advance their careers.

So far, Unum’s shift to a value stream model has been incremental, with the first iteration having been completed in the first quarter of 2026. Still, Anderson is confident that the move will yield benefits.

For example, having a single value stream owner creates a higher level of accountability for ensuring investments deliver value.

“They know the north star of the value stream,” she says, adding that this empowers value stream owners to make quicker, better decisions around starting, continuing, or stopping investments. The model works well with a persistent funding approach as well as using metrics and score cards for measuring benefits and ROI. All that in turn helps teams “have a clear understanding of the value stream and what’s expected.”

“It’s truly shifting culture, so there is a clear structure around what result do we want, what is the process change, what’s the change needed with people, and then what’s the technology that’s needed. It’s getting the right people in the room to make those decisions,” Anderson says. “It’s truly business and technology at the table doing that design.”

Getting to the big picture

After starting as CIO of Tungsten Automation in February 2025, Shelley Seewald restructured her IT department into three components: business operations, enterprise IT delivery, and IT operations. The IT department had had a traditional operating model structured around technology, with a Salesforce team, a financial systems team, and the like.

Seewald felt a shakeup in how IT operates would move the organization away from being order-takers, which she says leads to an “inefficient and ineffective use of technology.” Her new structure breaks down silos and allows IT to “see the bigger picture, to see the ecosystem, to connect dots, and to spot opportunities,” she says.

Now each IT delivery team is aligned to a commercial organization (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) or a back-office function (finance, legal, HR, etc.).

“The teams meet with them weekly, prioritize work, learn the business,” Seewald says. “This allows us [the IT department] to be a really a good technology partner. We’re there to understand the business first and then we offer them AI or technology solutions to help them reach their goals.”

IT operations is its own group comprising networking, help desk, and the like, Seewald adds. But even IT operations is expected to know the business side of the house. “They don’t align with a business per se, but we have them meet with IT delivery teams so they know what’s happening with the business as well and so they know about product introductions, new offices, and such.”

Challenges to tackle

Many CIOs have yet to move their IT operations from a conventional structure to one focused on products or value streams, says Rob Holbrook, principal of technology strategy and architecture with professional services firm Slalom.

The Global Tech Agenda 2026 from consultancy McKinsey & Co. reports that only about “one in ten top-performing companies have fully adopted product and platform models across all teams, which is more than four times that of other organizations. And nearly half of these companies indicate that at least half of their teams now operate this way.”

Such figures are not surprising, given the challenges that come with shifting how an organization operates.

For a shift to work, Holbrook says some CIOs and their teams must cultivate a true product mindset where IT leaders and workers have a clear understanding of the product IT delivery model.

CIOs also need to put in place a strong governance program to guide product teams, the business units, and the IT department in how to successfully work under such a model, Holbrook says. “They have to learn how to navigate it, and how to get needs prioritized,” he adds.

And CIOs should ensure that the focus on products and business outcomes doesn’t allow back-office needs to slip through the cracks, lest they end up with shadow IT filling those gaps, Holbrook says.

Powering growth

Julie Averill says moving to a modern IT operating model can produce significant value for an organization.

Averill modernized the IT operating model at Lululemon while working as executive vice president and global CIO from 2017 to 2025. She transitioned the department to product model mode, a shift that moved IT workers away from delivering initiatives to teams that owned products and the outcomes they were meant to generate.

“The business, management, and the product teams were all aligned along a mission and an outcome,” Averill explains. “The goal was to keep these teams together to work on outcomes but also have enough elasticity for team members to move to other products as business objectives changed.”

In this structure, Averill had centralized platform teams supporting shared infrastructure and capabilities, such as infrastructure, networking, and security. These teams, she notes, “became internal service teams.”

Averill, nowCEO of Gold Thread LLC and author of the book Chief Impact Officer, says changing the way IT operates “was an exercise in leadership.” It required convincing executive colleagues and business teams that the collaboration contributions they’d have to make and the new ways they’d have to fund product work would produce better results for the company. And it required hiring “technology-minded businesspeople and business-minded technologists who can understand and speak to the business but also can talk tech.”

Averill also says she needed to create professional communities, such as an engineering community, to support skills, standards, and a positive career experience for IT workers.

But the work was worth it, she says, crediting the changes she made while CIO with helping Lululemon grow from $2 billion to more than $10 billion in annual revenue over eight years.