Increasing digital footprints demand improved reporting tools

In Foundry’s State of the CIO Survey 2025, meeting compliance requirements and improving customer experience (CX) were two of the top three business initiatives for this year. On top of the pressure to leverage AI investments and oversee digital transformation projects, CIOs have never been under more pressure.

There’s no shortage of reporting tools to monitor the success of these initiatives, but the dangers of information overload is growing. Company websites are often a central plank informing CX and compliance, raising the need for CIOs to take a more central role in monitoring these assets. Failure to do so risks lost customers and revenue, as well as potential legal problems.

What can go wrong

In the US, lawsuits brought against companies for non-compliance of their websites with the American Disabilities Act (ADA) rose to 2,014 in the first six months of this year, an increase of 37% from 2024, according to digital accessibility consultants, EcomBack. Clothing retailer Fashion Nova, for example, recently agreed to pay $5.15 million to settle a class action suit brought in California over its website’s lack of accessibility for blind visitors.

The passing of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in June this year will likely see more legal actions in this trading bloc as well. And late last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority filed High Court proceedings against mattress retailer Emma Sleep over the misuse of countdown timers and ‘high demand’ claims on its website.

While lawsuits and government investigations over compliance issues have monetary and reputational costs for a business, poorly performing websites leading to lower CX scores can also cost the enterprise. Research from Google has shown that even a half second delay in a website loading can reduce traffic by 20%.

Tracking what matters

All this adds up to company websites increasingly moving into the domain of CIOs. Marketing typically has responsibility for web strategy, content, design, UX, and analytics, with IT departments often managing the technical backend requirements for hosting and content management. However, this demarcation needs to change if a more effective approach to handling compliance and CX is to be realized.

While marketing may provide monitoring reports to the board, these are often merely overviews of what’s happened, or tracked variables that are neither priorities from a strategic perspective, clear measures of business impact, or clearly signposted remedial actions.

Additional reporting on CX and compliance may come from other parts of the enterprise, including digital transformation teams, HR, and legal departments. For CIOs and other C-suite executives, though, this presents a lot of noise at the expense of clear signals.

Single source of truth

Gartner’s 2025 survey of CIOs and chief experience officers found that CIOs who worked closely with CxOs typically saw better results across digital investments than more siloed approaches. These so-called digital vanguard CIOs were up to twice as likely to meet or exceed outcome targets on digital initiatives than their counterparts. “CIOs can elevate their roles from technology operators to enterprise orchestrators, ultimately achieving the best possible business outcomes from their enterprises’ digital investments,” according to the survey. 

Realizing this approach requires new reporting tools that bring together data from across the enterprise, alongside clear actions mapped to corporate priorities. Orchestrating complex digital projects while ensuring compliance and effective CX from existing digital assets can’t be done if CIOs have to wade through lengthy reports from multiple stakeholders. And dashboards can bring together data from dispersed monitoring products such as Siteimprove and Dynatrace if configured correctly, but they lack the coordinated approach of linking core metrics to strategic priorities, and then mapping out actionable next steps.

“CIOs need to implement a single, CIO-owned reporting standard focused on risk and value to integrate insights from content management, security, and CX,” says Lloyd Golley, COO at diagnostics software provider, AAAnow. 

From reactive to proactive

The rules of business are changing, driven by AI, economic conditions, increasingly demanding customers, and regulatory pressures. With better tools to gather and manipulate them, reporting data is key to keeping ahead of this confluence of rapid change and uncertainty. However, most current reporting tools struggle to translate understanding into prioritized action. So more integrated approaches that bring together data from across the enterprise into a single view are needed.

SAP’s 2024 acquisition of digital adoption platform WalkMe and Workday’s purchase of HiredScore indicate established vendors moving in this direction as they seek to fill gaps in their data coverage. We can expect more providers to follow suit as CIOs increasingly demand more effective reporting tools.