The role of the CIO is rapidly changing, moving away from managing IT costs to leading change across the business. As corporate IT spending accelerates, more than three-quarters of CIOs say their role is becoming more innovation centred, according to Foundry’s State of the CIO Survey 2025. But IT decision-makers are also spending more time on infrastructure modernisation, security management and operational improvement than they did a year ago.
In most enterprises, innovation creates a need to confront complexity and address technical debt in order to integrate new solutions. Doing so allows IT leaders to put in place the critical building blocks required by innovation.
What does this look like in terms of numbers? Recently, McKinsey, the management consultancy, sketched out a scenario involving a notional B2B business looking at dozens of new technology initiatives.
Collectively, these initiatives had the potential to add $2 billion to the bottom line. Yet because the company’s tech stack was overburdened by technical debt, 70% of these projects required an additional investment of $400 million to simply reach the starting line.
Enabling innovation
Historically, the temptation to place infrastructure modernisation in the “too hard/not now” category has been substantial. But this approach is rapidly running out of road. As AI becomes an essential part of enterprise IT strategy, the need to modernise infrastructure is coming into sharp focus for several reasons:
- Traditional applications based around AI typically require flexible, scalable infrastructure and improved connectivity.
- Historic data management approaches are being overwhelmed by the demands of AI. These include the need to break down data silos, enhance data quality and deliver flexible data storage, processing and retrieval.
- Adopting zero trust security models designed for the cloud and AI frequently requires infrastructure modernisation.
- Legacy infrastructure is inefficient, as measured in terms of outages, sub-par performance and running costs.
- The fact AI itself is making modernisation easier, thanks to its ability to analyse legacy code, accelerate software development and automate IT operations.
IDC recommends enterprises must focus on three essential requirements, which it calls the three Ps: people (specialised technology skills), priorities (picking your technology battles) and partners (for example, IT services vendors).
Selecting the right partner for IT modernisation can also help to address the first two of these requirements, including access to deep pools of specialist talent and the experience required to assess and prioritise the workload.
At best, the result is a partnership based upon trust for the long term. As IDC notes, partnerships like these have the potential to turn an old proverb on its head. “To go alone is now to go slow; going together is faster and will take you further.”
Colt Technology Services is a trusted partner of organisations that rely on its network connectivity, cloud access and IT managed services to compete and succeed in the digital world. Discover the solutions at colt.net/solutions