**How Today’s CIOs Demonstrate Business Value Amid External Challenges**
Today’s Chief Information Officers (CIOs) face expectations beyond merely enabling business value — they are now responsible for driving and accounting for it. However, many CIOs find that external factors such as shadow IT or the underutilization of deployed systems and software limit the impact they can achieve.
To tackle this pressing issue, InformationWeek asked three IT leaders for their perspectives on how CIOs can effectively demonstrate business value. The unanimous conclusion: Calculations can’t be done in a vacuum.
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### Embracing Business Relationships and Shadow IT as Indicators
Michael Ringman, CTO at Ibex—a business process outsourcing and AI-powered customer engagement technology solutions provider—emphasized the importance of strong business relationships. He believes shadow IT serves as a litmus test of IT effectiveness.
Ringman compared the partnership between IT and the business to a marriage: “You both come together and bring 50%. It isn’t one part of the organization bringing 100%, or even 75%.”
Far from viewing shadow IT negatively, Ringman sees it as an opportunity. Discovering shadow IT within a company is “super cool,” he said, because it signals that the business has identified a problem and found a solution independently. This highlights areas where IT isn’t fully engaging with the business to create and drive value, prompting IT leaders to seek out such instances.
Additionally, Ringman shared that his approach to achieving successful projects involves making numerous small investments and “failing fast,” rather than committing to “big bang” projects all at once.
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### Change Management: Relentless, Adaptive, and Critical in the AI Era
Scott Weller, CTO of EnFi, a company specializing in AI-powered credit risk analysis and monitoring, discussed how change management remains crucial, especially as businesses undergo digital transformation.
AI amplifies the need for robust and rapid change management. IT departments today are tasked not only with measuring outcomes at the end of projects but also tracking efficiencies and revenue improvements during projects. They must also serve as hyper evaluators of new technologies, connecting them to real business benefits.
“Evaluating technology requires intimate knowledge of the business use cases you’re supporting,” Weller explained.
Weller noted that the enterprises most successful with digital transformation are those that reorganize IT to collaborate closely with business units, aiming to seize specific market opportunities. As companies embrace AI transformation, he advocates embedding technologists directly inside business teams—either temporarily based on expertise or as part of a hub-and-spoke model.
He observed that organizations with more successful AI proofs of concept (POCs) typically don’t rely on AI councils. Instead, they integrate AI experts into business teams who work semi-independently, allowing greater agility and focus.
This approach favors a **top-down, intentionally incremental strategy** rather than massive, sweeping implementations. Clear mandates, vision, and structural support are essential to making it work effectively.
Weller also described how his teams shifted from two-week sprint cycles to mandated three-day impact assessments during AI projects. These short cycles enable rapid reevaluation—helping teams decide whether to continue, pivot, or pause based on learnings and emerging factors.
“The three-day cycles help the team reevaluate — should we keep going? Are we getting closer? Are there new decisions? What did we learn? It also allows you to make new decisions if there’s something new coming,” he said.
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### Expecting Chaos and Leveraging Data
Dmytro Voloshyn, CTO and co-founder of Preply, a global language learning marketplace, addressed how external forces such as vendors, regulatory changes, market shifts, and technological innovation create complexity that affects IT’s business value.
To effectively navigate this chaos, Voloshyn underscored the importance of data. For example, last year, Preply partnered with OpenAI to evaluate the impact of new enterprise AI tools on productivity. By calculating time savings across departments in the first year post-deployment, they were able to predict the total monetary value of those improvements.
He said, “Money talks.”
Voloshyn stressed that having a common denominator — discussing costs and business value without diving into technical specifics — helps bridge the gap between IT and business stakeholders. This sentiment echoes that of the other experts:
> “If you want to impact the business, you should understand how the business works.”
One of Voloshyn’s closest internal partners is the CFO, with whom he collaborates on long-term planning. Sharing a common language facilitates smoother collaboration, resulting in aligned vision and roadmaps. While specific details — like the “leading AI vendor” — may evolve over time, they maintain consensus on longer-term investments needed for technology and workforce upskilling.
“It’s a bit of an art to remain operationally effective and still strategic,” Voloshyn reflected. “One of the most important things is to stay agile and human-centered, because with all this automation and changes we see with AI, human connection will become an even more valuable element of how organizations operate.”
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### Conclusion
CIOs today must not only enable technology but actively drive measurable business value through strong partnerships, agile change management, and data-driven decision-making. By embracing shadow IT as an opportunity, integrating technologists within business units, and maintaining strategic yet flexible roadmaps, IT leaders can navigate the evolving landscape — ensuring their initiatives deliver real impact across their organizations.
https://www.informationweek.com/it-management/ask-the-expert-how-cios-prove-business-value