CIOs must develop domain knowledge across business functions to effectively align IT with organizational goals
Technology is business. That’s not a prediction, it’s reality. So, if CIOs want a seat at the table, they need to understand more than just their own systems. They need to understand how every part of the organization works. Not in abstract theory, but in terms of outcomes, pressures, and drivers.
This doesn’t mean a CIO needs to become a finance expert or run marketing campaigns. It means knowing how those teams define success and where technology helps or holds them back. That comes from talking with them, being in the room with sales, shadowing support teams, understanding what happens in operations. You learn quickly where technology creates friction, and where it can accelerate execution.
AI puts this into focus. Right now, every department wants AI. Some understand what they’re asking for, many don’t. Vendors are aggressive. Stakeholders chase headlines. A CIO with domain knowledge can cut through the noise. They map business pain to technological precision. They become the ones who don’t just advise, they drive momentum. And in a world moving faster every quarter, execution speed is non-negotiable.
This standard applies whether you’re a mid-sized manufacturer or a global finance firm. The companies that win are the ones where tech leadership is embedded in daily business strategy. In short: if you know how your company makes money and where it loses time, you’re already ahead.
Bhadresh Patel, Chief Operating Officer at RGP, sums it up well: the CIO must be deep enough to stay in every conversation and broad enough to link them all together. Domain knowledge isn’t optional, it’s critical infrastructure.
Mastery of financial principles is vital for CIOs to drive business value through tech investments
A lot of CIOs talk about ROI. But that’s the surface. If you’re not looking at margins, cash flow, capital efficiency, and how that scales across business lines, you’re not making informed decisions, you’re making guesses with good intentions.
If you want your roadmap to lead somewhere impactful, you need to understand how your organization actually makes money. That means looking into where high-margin customers are, which products drive repeat business, where services are bleeding out cost, and where the real growth levers sit. Once you understand that, IT stops being a cost center and starts becoming a force multiplier.
Keith Golden, CIO at RGP, insists on this. He’s right. If you don’t know where revenue originates or profit erodes, you can’t align investments with reality. You just throw tech at problems and hope something sticks. That’s not strategic. That’s luck.
Sanjeev Vohra, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Genpact, takes it further, pointing out that business value today is defined by outcomes, not activity. It’s not enough to track service metrics. Tech leaders must deliver results executives care about, growth, efficiency, margins. That only happens when IT is fluent in business language.
Mike Trkay, CIO at FICO, highlights a specific point every executive should pay attention to: customer lifetime value and product profitability. The best CIOs are not buried in compliance or infrastructure upkeep, they’re uncovering data patterns the business hasn’t seen, and using those insights to steer product, marketing, and customer success toward profit.
If a CIO understands financial mechanics, they can push for changes in process, automation, architecture, or investment that directly impact the business’s edge in the market. That’s value. That’s leadership. Anything less is noise.
Understanding go-to-market strategy and market positioning enables CIOs to support business growth and product success
IT isn’t a support function anymore. It’s a driver of growth. For CIOs, understanding how products are positioned, sold, and supported in the market isn’t optional, it’s foundational to strategic impact. If your business is releasing a high-margin, high-impact product, the tech supporting it has to be as agile and robust as the commercial strategy behind it. If the sales cycle needs to shorten, the tools your teams use to engage customers, deliver demos, and close deals need to be frictionless and fast.
This means CIOs must understand what customers value and what differentiates the business from its competitors. If you can’t answer what makes your product sticky or what enables faster time-to-market, you risk slowing everyone else down. Your IT roadmap should be directly tied to commercial execution, marketing automation, product analytics, customer onboarding, all of it.
Mike Trkay, CIO at FICO, is direct about this. He believes a CIO must know where the business expects growth to come from, and then engineer systems that align with that path. Trkay emphasizes that understanding market dynamics changes how you build, secure, and scale technology products. It’s not just what you build, it’s why and for whom.
Bhadresh Patel, COO at RGP, doubles down on the competitive angle. CIOs need awareness of what the world outside their enterprise is doing. What are competitors doing with digital tools? What are the trends? What sales enablement technologies are giving other teams efficiency gains? This kind of market intelligence allows IT to move faster, with more precision.
The payoff is real. According to Gartner’s 2025 CIO and Technology Executive Survey, organizations where CIOs co-own go-to-market strategy with business leaders, known as “Digital Vanguards”—hit digital initiative targets 71% of the time. The rest hit just 48%. Execution doesn’t wait, so tech and business strategies have to move as one.
CIOs must treat change management as a strategic discipline to lead transformation effectively
Most digital initiatives fail not because the tech is bad, but because the organization isn’t built to absorb change. CIOs leading transformation projects need to evolve. It’s not enough to deploy tools or roll out platforms. If you can’t move people, inside departments, across teams, the technology won’t matter.
Change management isn’t a checklist. It’s a skillset rooted in leadership. It requires emotional awareness, sharp communication, and the discipline to lay out a structure for transition. Without that, resistance shows up fast, adoption lags, and value is delayed.
CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO survey confirms the shift: 81% of CIOs say they now lead business and tech initiatives, and 82% say they’re now more involved in digital transformation than anyone else at the executive level. They’re not only building the systems, they’re guiding people through the shift.
Eric Bloom, Executive Director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute, is clear: CIOs must understand that true change happens at the human level. It’s about clarity, trust, and consistent communication. Especially now, as AI and automation reshape role definitions across departments, people will need to trust that leadership has a plan, and it’s the CIO’s job to support that trust.
Anjali Shaikh, Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting LLP, draws the line clearly: today’s CIO must be a business and people leader. That’s a sharp break from the tech-only archetype of the past. Companies that recognize this are putting CIOs at the helm of strategy, and getting results because of it.
Deloitte’s 2024 CIO survey shows that only 46% of CIOs consider themselves technical experts, while 54% identify as change agents. That’s telling. The future of the role is strategic, and the companies that succeed will make space for CIOs who lead organizational evolution with clarity and intent.
CIOs must understand business risk in a holistic sense to make informed, strategic IT decisions
Risk isn’t just a cybersecurity problem. It’s a business problem. If you’re a CIO and you’re only thinking about risk in terms of encryption, firewalls, or access control, you’re missing the broader impact. Risk today spans financial exposure, regulatory pressure, operational downtime, customer trust, and competitive position. CIOs who understand risk through that wider lens are better positioned to influence board-level decisions and unlock strategic value through technology.
CIOs are expected to speak the same language as the CEO and the board. That means understanding risk tolerance, risk appetite, and the cost of inaction. It means knowing how to adjust technology investments to address not just threats, but also what happens when you fail to innovate fast enough. Technical controls need to match business outcomes, maintaining uptime, protecting data, complying with evolving global regulations, and avoiding decisions that erode trust or reputation.
Jamil Farshchi, Chief Technology Officer at Equifax, explains this clearly. He advocates for “holistic risk governance,” which means understanding how tech decisions directly affect financial performance and market reputation. His team moved 22,000 employees to passwordless authentication, not just to improve security, but to eliminate the friction of password fatigue. The result was a significant reduction in incident exposure and a surge in employee satisfaction. Efficient, secure, and aligned with the business. That’s how risk strategy delivers value.
Keith Golden, CIO at RGP, reinforces the need for CIOs to understand cross-functional risks, from legal and financial compliance to customer data protection. You don’t have to live in those departments, but you need to know what keeps your peers up at night. The CIO who can connect business unit concerns with scalable, smart solutions becomes indispensable.
Gartner’s 2025 CIO Leadership Perspectives Survey validates this mindset. For the fourth year in a row, CIOs ranked cybersecurity and risk management as their number one priority. It’s not just about minimizing threats, it’s about enabling confident decision-making across the enterprise through strong, integrated risk awareness.
The bottom line is this: if technology leaders don’t understand how risk affects revenue, reputation, and readiness, they can’t lead in complex environments. Holistic risk thinking isn’t an add-on, it’s now central to the modern CIO’s role.
Key takeaways for leaders
- Develop domain knowledge to stay relevant: CIOs should build functional understanding across departments to align tech strategy with business outcomes and lead cross-functional conversations with clarity and speed.
- Speak the language of finance: CIOs must go beyond ROI and understand margins, revenue dynamics, and how profit is generated to align tech investments with financial impact and corporate growth targets.
- Connect IT to market impact: Leaders should integrate go-to-market and product positioning knowledge into IT decisions to ensure digital initiatives support customer acquisition, differentiation, and faster revenue realization.
- Lead transformation like a strategist: CIOs should treat change management as a leadership discipline, combining communication, emotional intelligence, and structure, to drive adoption and long-term transformation success.
- Manage risk like a business executive: CIOs must evaluate technology decisions through the lens of enterprise risk, including regulatory, reputational, and operational exposure, to enhance resilience and maintain trust at scale.
