The IT leader’s challenge: Making the case for IT as a business value driver

IT is no longer solely measured by how effective they are at supporting day-to-day operations — they’re expected to find innovative ways to drive real business value, and as digital transformation has flourished, those expectations have only grown.

The potential of IT for businesses is limitless, with more opportunities and applications emerging all the time. Not only can IT ensure that digital tools, systems, and applications work better than ever for everyone that needs them — IT and digital departments can also act as incubators for innovation, enabling colleagues across the business to take advantage of advances like AI, BI, and automation.

None of this massive potential is news to IT leaders. What they need is for the business to understand and recognize it too.

The challenge is how to reframe IT as a value driver, rather than a cost drain. That’s why we worked with CIO.com, a leading publication for IT professionals, to create a whitepaper that helps IT reframe the value of their function. It covers how IT’s role is changing, why proving the value of tech investment is crucial, and which tactics IT leaders can use to become strategic changemakers and revenue drivers for their enterprises.

Get the free whitepaper; Keep reading for a snapshot of what the whitepaper covers.

What business value are CIOs driving with IT?

There’s a clear business case for how IT investment (and, subsequently, IT-led digital transformation) benefits the entire enterprise. Here are some examples of business-wide areas that benefit from adequately-funded, well-supported IT projects:

• Product development: McKinsey research shows that businesses with a focus on digital transformation and innovation are up to 10 times faster at developing new products. Not only that, but the products they make are three times more likely to meet customer needs. These are competitive advantages at any time, but are especially compelling when customer expectations and quality benchmarks are rising exponentially.
• Data collection and processing: With the right investment in their work, IT can become better data stewards, not only reliably meeting businesses’ responsibilities for securing customer data (which are evolving as regulations change), but also actually using all types of data the organization handles more effectively — recording it, analyzing it, and sharing it efficiently across the organization so that it can inform and support decisionmaking. In a McKinsey survey, 76% of companies said better master data management would lead to revenue growth, and 62% said it would reduce IT’s operating costs.
• New technologies: Automation is another way of driving value, and it’s just one of the many use cases for innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies are enabling businesses to streamline a whole host of time-consuming manual tasks across functions in Supply Chain, Procurement, Finance, Manufacturing, Customer Service, and more — so they can not only save money in many cases, but also reinvest that time into value-add activities that every function of the business really wants to get into.

These use cases are just a sampling of the variety of ways IT can help the larger business grow. And make no mistake: enhancements in areas like those called out above directly impact companies’ bottom lines.

IBM found that organizations that are high-performing tech leaders have outpaced their peers in annual revenue growth by up to 52%. And if your business wants to rank in the top 10% for earnings and revenue growth, McKinsey reports that organizations are 10 times more likely to accomplish that goal with a strong technology and innovation culture.

IT undeniably has the potential to generate tangible business impact, and CIOs are now shifting their role to realize it, with 49% of those surveyed by Foundry targeting a primarily strategic focus in the next 1-3 years. When IT becomes more integrated in high-level decision making, IT leaders can target value for the business as a whole. But it’s not that easy…

What’s getting in IT’s way?

There are two major obstacles blocking IT’s path to value-generating leadership:

1. IT’s struggle to show return on tech investments against tightening budgets.
2. IT’s difficulty managing ongoing (and compounding) complexity within their tech landscapes.

Leaders trying to expand IT investment increasingly come up against budget pressures and constraints. In 2024, 46% of IT leaders told Foundry that their budgets weren’t rising, and in the same survey, lack of budget was the top obstacle to deploying new technology. In another survey, 41% told Foundry that budget constraints and demonstrating ROI were their key challenges. Clearly, the two are related — it’s tricky to argue for budget bumps when ROI on existing investments is hard to frame.

IT’s also hamstrung by managing suboptimal legacy systems, mountains of service tickets, drawn-out, over-budget projects, and sprawling (and expensive) software portfolios. For example, in 2024, the average SaaS portfolio was 342 applications, and many large organizations may have even more.

It’s IT’s job to contain costs associated with all of these things, and to keep everything running optimally for everyone. When your day-to-day role is already this complicated, it’s tough to find the time, money, or bandwidth for higher-level transformation.

What IT leaders are missing is a way to see and understand all of the ways their organization’s technologies work with (or sometimes against) each other. They also need a better way to communicate with non-IT colleagues about it all — a common language for collaboration.