Who should really be driving business transformation today?

When it comes to transformational work, Ryan Downing classifies his CIO position as “an enabler.”

“My teams support a number of enabling capabilities that help drive growth and enhance the customer experience. Often we help bring people together across the organization to solve our biggest challenges,” he says of his and his staff’s role. “I feel like I’m at my best when there’s clarity on the business outcome, and I can work side by side with business leaders to outline a path forward.”

Moreover, Downing, vice president and CIO of enterprise business solutions at Principal Financial Group, believes “the CIO should be a strong partner in shaping what’s possible, consulting with the business to help define [the desired business] outcomes. From there, the CIO plays a key role in partnering with business leaders to orchestrate and execute the transformation, ensuring the desired results are achieved.”

He also views the CIO post as one that challenges the status quo and co-leads change.

To illustrate that, he points to a past initiative aimed at transforming his company’s customer experience, with the goal of creating a more cohesive experience to drive long-term growth.

“Working closely with leaders across marketing, customer experience, and multiple business units, we aligned on a clear outcome: improving ease of use for our customers,” he recounts. “Throughout that effort I found myself challenging some of our traditional ways of working, including how we operate across organizational lines. In some cases this meant encouraging our teams to step outside their usual structures to deliver something more unified for our customers. In others, it meant pushing our engineering teams to adopt modern architectures that could scale with our business.”

Who drives transformation?

Ryan’s assessment on the CIO’s part in transformation speaks to an ongoing discussion — or debate, for some — about whether IT should drive digital transformation (DX) or whether another exec should be in the driver’s seat.

It’s a critical question to ponder, given the importance businesses place on transformation — and the low rate of success of transformation efforts.

It’s clear that most organizations see transformation as a business imperative. Some 85% of organizations identified as digital transformation leaders said DX was a core pillar of business strategy, according to The State of Digital Transformation Report 2025 from TEKsystems, an IT staffing and services firm.

Yet, according to the Gartner 2025 CIO Survey, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets.

CIOs, executive advisers, consultants and researchers cite multiple reasons for the low success rate.

“There are a dozen-plus reasons why transformation fails or fails to meet expectations,” says Ari Lightman, a professor with Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. Sometimes an enterprise’s vision for its future is misaligned with the market. Sometimes the organization fails to adapt quickly enough to market changes, or they’re chasing trends that don’t materialize into lasting changes.

The TEKsystems report cites other reasons for failed transformation, such as limited data-driven decision-making, poor change management practices, and a lack of needed talent.

But having the right leadership in place contributes to success, TEKsystems also found. Its research shows that 80% of DX leaders focused on having “the right mix of IT and business stakeholders” at the planning stages of transformation, versus only 47% of organizations identified as DX laggards.

The case for a chief transformation officer

Dave Borowski, senior partner and D.C. office lead at digital services firm West Monroe, believes the best-positioned executive to drive transformation is neither an IT exec nor a business leader but “a cross-functional leader who reports into the CEO.”

“When you talk about real enterprise transformation, endemic transformation, it needs to be inherently cross-functional,” he says. “And the fear I have is that if it resides in one functional domain — whether it’s the CIO or CFO or COO — it takes on the persona of that function and the results that that business function cares most about.”

He believes that if the CIO owns transformation, “it tends to be more technology-oriented, it tends to have technology as the solution rather than a component.”

Similarly, if it’s owned by the CFO, it’s about cost transformation. If it’s the COO, it’s about operational transformation. For the CMO, it’s go-to-market transformation.

“Each functional leader,” Borowski explains, “risks being a hammer looking for a nail.”

(Borowski, like others, also prefers “transformation” without the “digital” before it for much the same reason, saying, “The digital piece to me is inherently limiting, because it makes it a technology problem to be solved.”)

Borowski believes having a position dedicated to transformation that is a peer to the other CXOs who orchestrates across them “can prioritize based on what’s most important to the enterprise and not any one function.”

Others endorse the chief transformation officer (CTO) position. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co., for one, notes in an online post that the CTO “will significantly improve the chances of a successful transformation.”

The CTO, however, is not a common position, which is why many organizations still fall short of their transformation objectives, Borowski says.

“The CTO role is something more aspirational than what we see right now,” he adds.

But don’t count out the CIO

Despite a persuasive case for a chief transformation officer, others aren’t convinced that such a position is required for successful transformation. In fact, they say there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to who should drive transformation.

“I don’t think there’s any right answer,” says Lightman, co-author of the forthcoming book Monster Transformation: Conquer Your Digital Fears, Be AI Ready, and Focus on What Matters to Your Organization.

Lightman says CEOs should be the person “who sets the vision on any transformation.”

But he says multiple factors — including the organization’s culture, its strategy, and its industry — play a role in determining which individual or role is best positioned to drive transformation. The individuals in each role, along with their traits and skills, also should inform who should drive transformation in an organization, he adds.

Diane Carco, a former CIO and now president of management consulting company Swingtide, has a similar take.

“We have seen companies approach it lots of different ways, and there’s not one that I would point to and say, ‘That’s really good,’” she says.

But Carco endorses the need for an executive “who doesn’t own a business unit” but rather has a central perch within the enterprise.

“You need someone who is a change person, who says, ‘No more boundaries,’ who’s going to eliminate siloes, who’s going to fix the business problems that need solving, and get everyone on board,” she says. “If you don’t have all that, then you end up doing fringe projects instead of transformation.”

The position capable of doing all that could be a chief transformation officer, Carco says, but it could also be the CIO.

“CIOs have the skills to run transformation, because they’re used to dealing with complex change and coordinating with a lot of different departments. So if an organization is going to give transformation to a role that already exists [in the organization], then I’d say it should go to the CIO,” she adds.

Lightman, too, says some CIOs have the requisite skills to drive transformation.

But even if they’re not the ones to drive it, CIOs should always be one of the players on the team, Lightman says — echoing Downing’s view of transformation as a group effort.

“Transformation is everybody’s responsibility,” he adds.

CIO as co-driver, co-leader, team player

Evan Wayne, senior vice president and CIO at Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real estate investment brokerage and capital markets services firm, sees himself as a co-leader in transformation.

“Collaborating closely with a well-coordinated executive team, we developed a strategic roadmap tailored specifically to the business’s needs. Through an integrated implementation team — both business and technical expertise — we drove numerous critical and transformational changes that enhanced the organization,” he explains.

“As CIO, I play a critical role in driving transformation by understanding strategic opportunities, solution options, business challenges, and various execution methods,” he adds. “I handle program management, business case development, and change management, wearing multiple hats throughout the transformation process.”

Bala Krishnapillai, CIO of Hitachi Americas, has a similar view when it comes to where the CIO fits in transformation.

“There is no one team leading,” he says. “It is a combined effort.”

He says business units typically focus on creating new business models and new revenue streams as well as improving product lines. But making those a reality requires IT’s involvement, as IT provides the needed data, processing power, digital infrastructure, and technology innovation.

Krishnapillai points to a recent initiative that sought to transform the sales program as a case in point. As part of that transformation, the company sought to create a holistic picture of its customers to increase opportunities to cross-sell and upsell. That business objective required IT to centralize the data collected across Hitachi’s nearly 600 group companies to create a complete picture of each customer. It also required IT to implement the right data infrastructure and analytics capabilities.

“So it’s a joint force driving transformation,” Krishnapillai says. “There are certain phases where the business takes lead and IT takes the backseat, and there are other places where IT takes the lead and business augments and supports that. It’s all about what needs to be done from a business standpoint, because we don’t want to create transformation purely based on technology.”

West Monroe’s Borowski also believes the CIO has a critical role in “co-piloting” transformation, even in organizations that have a chief transformation officer.

“I do think that many tech organizations have embraced that they’re stewards of more than technology; they also drive change and optimize processes,” he says, noting that today it’s difficult to distinguish between process improvement and tech improvement because they’re so intertwined.

“For transformation to be successful, everybody has to have an active voice and role,” he says. “But many of the changes will be tech-led; they just can’t be exclusively about technology. And if CIOs don’t have an active leadership role, then transformation won’t be successful.”