Shift from passive support to a strategic initiative
Most IT teams operate reactively. They wait to be told what’s broken or what software needs installation. That’s a dead end. If you want IT to be part of decision-making, not just a tool for fixing problems, it has to move upstream in the process. Being strategic means you’re not just responding to what’s requested. You’re solving the business problem before anyone else sees it.
Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, said it plainly: many IT teams say they can’t act until someone tells them to. To play a real role in business growth, IT has to lead with insight. Offer ideas. Identify friction. Use your understanding of systems and workflows to suggest real changes. Don’t wait for permission. Bring something to the table.
Bill Young from RightClick summed it up: stop thinking your job is to fix things, and start believing your job is to improve the business. That mindset drives the shift. Dana Stocking, head of IT at Mercor, takes this further, he pushes his teams to get to the root of every request. Don’t just fulfill it. Ask why it’s needed. There’s often a deeper issue, and nine times out of ten, an off-the-shelf solution wasn’t the best one anyway.
Also, the way you define success matters. Noe Ramos at Agiloft said it best, effective IT leaders see themselves as part of something bigger. The real value comes when individuals and teams stop clinging to “their system” and focus instead on shared business outcomes. That’s the pivot that turns IT from execution arm to strategic partner.
You don’t need permission to be strategic. But if you’re still waiting for it, you won’t get there.
Deepen business acumen to align IT with organizational goals
If IT doesn’t understand the business, it gets treated like a cost center. That’s avoidable. To gain influence, IT leaders need to stop thinking like system administrators and start acting like business partners. That starts with one thing: get in the room.
Eric Johnson at PagerDuty emphasizes this constantly. He expects his team to collaborate directly with the sales group. That’s deliberate. It’s not just about tech support, it’s about gaining inside knowledge of how the business actually operates. IT staff who sit through sales reviews, performance updates, and planning sessions walk away with a clearer understanding of what’s at stake and how to help.
Joe Locandro at Rimini Street gives his team a similar directive. Attend executive meetings. Hear the jargon. Understand the drivers. It’s the only way to speak the same language as your decision-makers. You won’t get that sitting behind a ticketing system or only attending scrum meetings. You have to embed.
Adrienne DeTray from Universal Technical Institute reinforces it. Her teams don’t just attend tech standups. They drop into ops reviews, quarterly business planning, and strategy sessions. They get close, physically and strategically. No alignment happens without context. If you want to contribute meaningfully, start by listening more than you talk.
This is basic: if IT doesn’t understand what the business is trying to do, it can’t help deliver it. When the tech team starts anticipating needs and proposing solutions in line with key priorities, that’s when things start to change.
This shift is about more than just influence. It leads to smarter integration, faster implementation, and solutions that actually matter. You don’t do that by staying behind the firewall. You do that by being at the table.
Start with business goals
Too often, IT teams are handed tickets and asked to implement a tool, configure a system, or automate a process, without context. If your work starts and ends with execution, you’ve already missed the opportunity to lead. A serious shift happens when IT begins by asking, “What outcome do you need?”
Adrienne DeTray, CIO at Universal Technical Institute, makes it clear: IT shouldn’t focus on fulfilling requests, they should focus on understanding what’s driving them. Is the goal to close books faster? Reduce manual input in sales? Improve customer experience? These are far more valuable questions than whether a certain tool needs integration. Clarify the outcome first, then design the solution.
At PagerDuty, Eric Johnson and his team run monthly portfolio alignment meetings. These aren’t check-ins, they’re outcome briefings. The question at each session is simple: what’s the desired state, and what’s standing in the way? That process allows Johnson’s team to skip the back-and-forth over specifications and move straight to suggesting targeted solutions. Whether it’s automation for finance or an AI assistant for sales, every idea connects directly to business impact.
This kind of thinking turns IT into a growth engine. It allows teams to anticipate instead of chase. It filters out noise and focuses time and talent where it matters most. The outcome-first mindset also creates tighter feedback loops between technical execution and strategic value, which decision-makers notice.
Most importantly, business leaders don’t care about tools. They care about progress. If you’re not tying your work to real business targets, goals, revenue, efficiency, you’re turning potential influence into technical debt. And that limits everyone.
Communicate outcomes over technical activities
If you’re still reporting that you closed 100 tickets or pushed a code update, you’re missing the point. Executives don’t need a task list, they need to see how what you delivered changed the business. Reporting outcomes instead of activities is the fastest way to elevate how IT is viewed at the leadership table.
Joe Locandro at Rimini Street raised this issue directly. He noticed that most IT reports listed technical completions, upgrades, server moves, deployments, but not value. That’s not useful to the business. The conversation needs to shift from “we did something” to “this is what it enabled.”
Noe Ramos at Agiloft offers a practical way to reframe this. Instead of saying “we automated the sales workflow,” say “we gave the sales team back 200 hours each month to focus on clients.” That difference in framing isn’t just communication, it’s positioning. It demonstrates how IT enables results, not transactions.
Christopher Daden, CTO at Criteria Corp, emphasized that executives care about outcomes like improved customer experience, revenue acceleration, or lower operational risk. He tells his team to frame each project around the problem it solves or the opportunity it unlocks. That shift positions IT squarely in the strategic core of the business.
You can deliver brilliant technical solutions, but if you frame them in abstract or operational terms, you lose visibility. If, instead, you measure and speak in outcomes, time saved, cost avoided, growth enabled, you make the value clear. No translation needed.
Talking about tasks keeps you operational. Communicating outcomes puts you in the conversation where decisions get made. That’s where IT belongs.
Accumulate small wins to drive major impact
Most organizations overestimate the value of a single massive project and underestimate the power of momentum built by consistent progress. Large transformation efforts are slow and risky. Meanwhile, small, clearly valuable changes delivered regularly build credibility and measureable impact, fast.
Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, encourages his IT teams to actively look for “quick wins” within a 30- to 60-day window. These are tactical improvements that optimize operations without press releases or multi-month planning cycles. Automate a redundant step. Retire an underused tool. Clear roadblocks that slow teams down. All of this compounds.
One practical example came from Meg Donovan, Chief People Officer at Nexthink. Her IT team used usage data to demonstrate that certain software tools, once thought essential, were barely being used. By reassessing licenses across their 2,500-user base, they made cost-efficient decisions. It didn’t require disruption. Just insight and execution.
This approach is highly effective in demonstrating ongoing value. Every operational win deepens trust from the business. IT becomes a team that solves, not a team that needs justification. And it changes expectations: you stop being asked what went wrong and start being asked what’s next.
To keep this going, you need a repeatable process for spotting inefficiencies, looking at metrics, and acting on what matters. For decision-makers, this translates directly into saved budget, faster outcomes, and a growing sense that IT has strategic awareness and delivery discipline.
You don’t need a massive rollout to prove value. You need results that are visible, repeatable, and aligned with business priorities. Stack them up, and they speak for themselves.
Measure impact to validate IT’s strategic value
Too many teams implement a solution and move straight to the next task without checking if the original problem was truly solved. That’s a blind spot. Measuring results after deployment is what confirms value. It’s also what builds strategic credibility.
Eric Johnson at PagerDuty pointed out that this post-implementation step is often skipped. IT solves for pain points, ships fast, and then assumes it worked. But without measuring the real change, before and after, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, your stakeholders won’t either.
This feedback loop needs to be explicit. Did the automation cut processing time by 25%? Did performance improve beyond baseline? Did the investment reduce manual rework or increase employee output in a measurable way? These aren’t technical questions, they’re business ones.
Following through also forces accountability, especially when things don’t work as expected. Strategic IT teams go back, troubleshoot the gap between intended and actual outcomes, and adapt. That behavior doesn’t just show technical maturity, it signals business ownership.
Decision-makers pay close attention to this. They respond to data, progress metrics, and confidence in delivery. When IT comes to the table with measured outcomes, not just completed tasks, it puts them in the same feedback loop as finance or operations. It makes the department count.
Execution without evaluation is incomplete. You build stronger partnerships when you close the loop and present real business impact, good or bad. That’s where trust starts to scale.
Leverage AI to enhance strategic capacity
Artificial intelligence isn’t the strategy, it’s the enabler. The real benefit comes from using AI to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, freeing up the team to solve harder problems and drive bigger outcomes. When AI handles the routine, your most skilled people can focus on what actually moves the business forward.
Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, pointed out that many IT teams are already using agentic AI systems to handle Level 1 support. That’s smart. It eliminates delays and increases efficiency where speed matters, not deep analysis. More importantly, it lets high-value engineers work on initiatives that require creativity, systems thinking, or cross-functional collaboration.
At Criteria Corp, CTO Christopher Daden shared that over 80% of their production code is now authored by AI systems. That’s not theory, it’s real execution. The result? Engineering productivity jumped by at least 30%. More than 94% of their support tickets are now deflected by automation. And the customer experience didn’t suffer, it actually improved.
But Daden didn’t stop there. As AI took over low-impact tasks, members of the IT team transitioned into new roles focused on developing and refining AI models. They moved from maintenance to innovation. Those who stayed in IT operations are now building internal tools that expand the accuracy and relevance of those models, pushing value even further.
Bill Young at RightClick added another layer. He highlighted how AI-based note-taking tools can shift how meetings are run. Instead of losing focus by documenting every detail, IT professionals can engage fully and move faster from decisions to execution. Post-meeting summaries and action items are handled instantly. It eliminates interruption and increases velocity.
AI is not about replacement, it’s about capacity. And where capacity increases, so do impact and velocity. If deployed thoughtfully, AI becomes the resource that lets your technical team lead at a higher level. Not tomorrow, today.
Concluding thoughts
Every business is powered by systems. But if those systems, and the people behind them, are only there to fix problems, you’re not getting full value. IT isn’t just infrastructure. It’s intelligence, visibility, and scale. And when positioned right, it becomes one of your strongest strategic assets.
The shift doesn’t come from new tools or big budgets. It starts with mindset. IT teams that move from execution to ownership, from task to outcome, from request to recommendation, those are the ones driving business forward. They understand how the organization works, measure their impact, and use automation to multiply capacity.
If you’re in a leadership role, you don’t need more dashboards. You need partners who understand where the company is going and aren’t waiting to be told what to do. Strategic IT delivers that. Not someday, now.
