To succeed today, CIOs must be strategic partners. It’s no longer something to work toward achieving. “What used to be an aspiration, having a seat at the table, that’s now needed,” says George Westerman, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the Global Opportunity Forum, and co-chair of t…
To succeed today, CIOs must be strategic partners. It’s no longer something to work toward achieving. “What used to be an aspiration, having a seat at the table, that’s now needed,” says George Westerman, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the Global Opportunity Forum, and co-chair of t…
The CIOs of tomorrow will be crafting the vision of what is possible for the organization, advising their C-suite colleagues on integrating agents into their teams, and navigating high-pressure situations, says Westerman and other IT leaders.
To deliver on such expectations and ensure career longevity, CIOs and executive advisers cite these nine strategies for future-proofing IT leaders’ careers.
CIOs going forward must have “the willingness to look at the situation and think about what’s better,” Westerman says, explaining that this goes beyond improving how existing processes operate to remaking and transforming the organization into something new.
To achieve that, CIOs of the future will need to be visionary and adaptable, with the decisiveness to pivot quickly and the ability to “convince other people to come with you,” Westerman says. IT executives who have or who cultivate those traits now will be “ready for whatever tomorrow brings,” he adds
He and others note that some CIOs are already demonstrating these capabilities, for example, by developing a deep understanding of AI so they reimagine what’s possible for their organizations and remake their IT infrastructure and teams to deliver that envisioned future state.
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 19/10/2026
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Why it matters
When an organisation announces a turn like this, the announcement is rarely the interesting part. What matters is everything it forces to be reordered underneath: committed budgets, live contracts, teams built for something else. That is where you find out whether the decision had real backing or was a slide in a deck.
I read it looking for coordination cost. Every technology decision splits work across areas that do not report to each other, and that is where the return leaks out. If nobody defined who resolves it when two areas disagree, the project already has its grounding date set.
What usually goes wrong
Where I see this fail most is in the second half of the year. The announcement is made with energy, the team gets assembled, and eight months later the person driving it changed role or company. Without an institutional owner, not just a personal one, the programme fades without anybody formally cancelling it.
What to watch
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
How I read this entry
I would treat it less as a technology story and more as a market signal. If one player moves this way, in twelve to eighteen months the rest will have to answer something. Better to decide now, calmly, what that answer will be, rather than improvise it when a client asks.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
