CIOs face mounting pressure to deliver digital transformation
The role of the CIO is moving fast, and there’s no time to coast. Compliance and customer experience are top business priorities. According to Foundry’s State of the CIO Survey 2025, two of the top three initiatives for CIOs this year are driving compliance and enhancing CX. Data privacy laws are tightening. Customers expect intuitive, accessible digital experiences on-demand. And boards want results from AI and other digital investments.
This is a high-pressure game. Most CIOs already lead digital transformation, but today’s demands stack higher. You’re accountable not just for systems and uptime, but for how every digital property, especially websites, meets legal standards and keeps users coming back. And let’s be honest: when things go wrong, no one blames disconnected departments. They blame the executives.
The job is evolving from managing infrastructure to owning impact. Not just how a website loads, but whether it runs fast enough to keep users engaged, follows accessibility laws, and provides measurable returns. Most websites are still split between marketing and IT, driven by silos built years ago. But that structure doesn’t work anymore. Websites are business assets. They affect revenue, legal exposure, and brand reputation. And they need to be managed like it.
For the C-suite, the takeaway is clear: the CIO can’t be boxed into operational roles anymore. This needs board-level ownership. Technology is core to strategy, and strategy is core to survival.
Growing legal risks from website non-compliance can result in financial and reputational damage
The cost of not paying attention to website compliance is growing, fast. In the U.S. alone, lawsuits filed over websites that don’t meet American Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility standards reached 2,014 in the first six months of 2024. That’s up 37% over the same period last year. And it’s not just obscure cases. Fashion Nova, for example, agreed to a $5.15 million settlement in California for not making its site accessible to blind users.
Europe is ramping up too. The new European Accessibility Act, passed in June 2024, sets the stage for increased legal action in that region. In the U.K., regulators are cracking down on misleading tactics as well, mattress retailer Emma Sleep was taken to court for using deceptive countdown timers and fake urgency messages.
Compliance issues don’t just hit your legal team. They put your brand at risk and drain cash with zero return. That means addressing them isn’t just a legal problem, it’s a business one. And it’s not about checking a box and moving on. Accessibility and transparency standards are tightening across global markets. You either get ahead of them, or you pay the price.
The smart move is putting this directly under CIO oversight. Why? Because it’s not only about fixing broken links or restructuring code. It’s about owning the end-to-end digital environment, ensuring your platform meets ethical, regulatory, and user expectations. No digital initiative is successful if your audience can’t access it or if regulators knock your revenue flat with a fine.
For executives looking ahead, the principle is simple: prioritize legal preparedness in your digital strategy. It’s not overhead, it’s part of protecting innovation.
Website performance is a key driver of customer experience, directly impacting traffic and revenue
Digital performance isn’t optional anymore. It affects whether people stay or leave, click or convert. The user experience needs to be fast, smooth, and compliant. Research from Google makes it simple: a half-second delay in website load time can reduce traffic by 20%. That’s a loss of real users, real customers, and real revenue.
When your website underperforms, the signals are obvious. Bounce rates go up. Conversion rates drop. Customer support tickets increase. And worse, people don’t come back. Most of the complexity comes from UX design that’s disconnected from infrastructure. You end up with technically functional systems that don’t perform where it matters, in front of the customer.
It doesn’t help when deceptive design practices slide into mainstream use. Regulatory bodies are watching. The U.K. took Emma Sleep to court for using manipulative features like countdown clocks and fake urgency. This shows user experience and legal compliance are intersecting quickly. A poor design isn’t just frustrating; it’s potentially illegal.
If you’re in the C-suite, this isn’t a conversation to delegate entirely. Poor website performance isn’t just a technical failure, it’s a strategic one. Digital experience is a board-level responsibility. It drives perception, reputation, and revenue. Speed, accessibility, and trust, these are now core components of brand value.
Disparate and fragmented reporting methods hinder the ability of CIOs to derive actionable insights
Enterprise reporting needs a reset. Right now, most digital metrics come in from disconnected departments, marketing tracks engagement, IT manages uptime, legal might monitor compliance. The result? Long reports, inconsistent formats, and weak connections to business outcomes. For anyone leading transformation, that’s noise, not insight.
Important details are often buried. Marketing sends high-level engagement summaries. Legal flags issues after they’ve escalated. IT logs technical performance but doesn’t always tie it to customer impact. These silos don’t help when you’re trying to steer a digital strategy that works across the entire company. And sending executives a collection of recaps isn’t the same as providing data they can use to make decisions.
The lack of synchronization between departments means problems aren’t caught early, or aren’t understood in the right context. When information isn’t standardized, teams waste time aligning on what’s actually happening. This kills momentum and makes it harder to respond to risk or capitalize on opportunities.
The solution isn’t surfacing more data. It’s building systems that turn data into decisions. That starts with handing ownership of unified reporting to the CIO, or someone who sees across the stack. When the reporting structure is unified and focused on business-level KPIs, senior leaders can finally move from reactive analysis to proactive planning.
For executives, the ask is straightforward: support reporting that prioritizes signal over volume. Otherwise, you’re steering the business with incomplete information.
Implementing CIO-led, integrated reporting tools is essential to align digital operations with overarching business goals
Disconnected reporting doesn’t scale. You get scattered metrics, inconsistent formats, and contradictory signals from different parts of the business. The fix is direct: the CIO should own a universal reporting standard that pulls in the metrics that matter, from content performance, security, and CX, and connects them to risk and value. It’s not just about automating status updates. It’s about linking data to executive priorities.
Right now, many organizations rely on dashboards built from tools like Siteimprove or Dynatrace. These can be useful, but without coordination, they remain partial views. You see performance trends, but not how they tie to compliance concerns or customer behavior. Without a layer that translates metrics into actions and strategic impact, dashboards become background noise.
A centralized reporting system lets you act, not just observe. When reports map directly to business goals, whether it’s reducing churn, avoiding legal exposure, or improving operational resilience, decision-making becomes faster and clearer. CIOs and their teams can spot issues before they escalate and apply resources where they’ll have measurable impact.
Lloyd Golley, COO at diagnostics software company AAAnow, puts it clearly: “CIOs need to implement a single, CIO-owned reporting standard focused on risk and value to integrate insights from content management, security, and CX.” That type of structure creates visibility and accountability across the entire digital environment, exactly what’s needed as enterprises grow more complex.
If you’re in the C-suite, supporting this shift means investing in systems that compress complexity into clarity. That’s what enables faster moves, fewer blind spots, and better outcomes.
Enhanced collaboration between CIOs and C-suite executives drives superior digital outcomes
Digital initiatives don’t hit their targets when leadership stays siloed. CIOs who work closely with peers across the C-suite deliver better results, because goals, expectations, and risks are aligned early. This isn’t guesswork. Gartner’s 2025 survey shows CIOs who collaborate directly with other C-level roles are up to twice as likely to meet or exceed digital outcome targets.
The difference comes down to integration. When CIOs and other executives operate in sync, decisions are made with shared context. Transformation projects get moving faster, have clearer accountability, and bring measurable value. Without this alignment, priorities compete, timelines stretch, and investments underperform.
CIOs that step into broader orchestration roles, coordinating across marketing, operations, legal, and HR, turn technology into business leverage. Their teams are positioned to drive strategic initiatives while staying grounded in compliance, user experience, and operational discipline. They’re not just delivering systems, they’re delivering outcomes.
For executives, this means treating CIOs as strategic partners, not back-office technologists. It also means empowering them to lead through influence, visibility, and unified data. That leadership can’t come from silos. Strong digital performance happens when the C-suite operates as a team, not just a collection of functions.
Vendors are moving towards unified reporting platforms to fulfill increasing demands
The enterprise software market is shifting. Vendors are responding to what CIOs actually need, unified platforms that bring together reporting across digital experience, operations, compliance, and workforce management. It’s not about dashboards that show metrics in isolation. It’s about building systems that connect the dots between performance, risk, and business priorities.
You can see this market movement clearly. SAP’s 2024 acquisition of WalkMe, a digital adoption platform, shows their intent to close the gap between system engagement and productivity. Workday followed by acquiring HiredScore, adding AI-driven hiring insights into their ecosystem. These deals are not just about expanding features, they’re about consolidating intelligence. The goal is clear visibility across enterprise systems, delivered through one view, with actionable data.
This direction reflects pressure from CIOs. As digital estates grow more complex, traditional monitoring tools don’t go far enough. Alerts without context and analytics without integration don’t support enterprise-wide decision-making. What’s needed is total situational awareness, with data pulled in from websites, compliance tools, customer platforms, and internal workflows, structured to support strategic responses, not just reaction.
For executives, the message is straightforward: partner with vendors who understand this evolution. When software tools operate in silos, leaders are flying blind. When platforms extract and unify operational insights, decisions are faster, risks are lower, and opportunities scale faster. As demand for integrated intelligence grows, expect more acquisitions, partnerships, and innovation aimed at delivering truly cohesive management platforms. This evolution is already underway, and leading companies are moving with it.
Final thoughts
Digital leadership today isn’t just about launching new tools or modernizing infrastructure. It’s about aligning every digital decision with outcomes that matter, revenue, compliance, customer trust, and strategic clarity. The role of the CIO has moved past operations. It’s enterprise orchestration now.
Outdated reporting, fragmented oversight, and reactive decision-making slow down transformation. Executives who still view reporting as an IT task or compliance checklist are leaving value on the table.
The companies leading this shift are doing three things right. They’re integrating their data environments. They’re linking insights directly to business priorities. And they’re empowering CIOs to lead from the center, not the edge.
If you’re responsible for long-term growth, this is where focus should be, unifying systems, surfacing signal over noise, and turning digital complexity into confident decisions. That’s where competitive advantage lives now.
