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CIOs Elevated to the Boardroom

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis.


The study — based on a survey of 1,000 global technology leaders — demonstrates a monumental shift in the role of the CIO from tech implementor to business leader.

Today's tech leaders are actively involved in creating business strategy: 41% have some level of responsibility for business strategy, while 81% say they are spending more time on innovation. They are using their technology expertise to deliver innovative solutions that drive value and competitive advantage. Over three quarters (77%) are now spending more time selling ideas into the board.

"CIOs are playing a leading role in orchestrating transformation and are stepping up in response to the changing industry dynamics," said Bob Bailkoski, CEO at Logicalis. "Yet, CIOs are faced with challenges to navigate, including concerns of an impending recession and talent shortages. In addition to this, they are experiencing increased pressure to deliver digital-based outcomes for their organizations, giving them more exposure to their boards and requiring a different way of operating."

Orchestrating transformation on the journey towards a digital-first future means CIOs are forging a new path. The four critical areas of focus for CIOs identified in the report include:

Innovation: 50% of CIOs are expected to deliver continuous innovation that elevates and differentiates customer and employee interactions.

Strategy: 80% say that business strategy will become a bigger part of their role over the next two years.

Digital Transformation: 57% say that building and operating new digital platforms is still a core part of their job.

Reimagining Service Partnerships: 74% expect to increase spending on IT outsource management in 2023.

"Modern CIOs are confident in the skills and expertise needed to support their organization's technology structures," said Jon Groves, CEO of Logicalis US. "The CIO's role has shifted and now requires a renewed focus on strategic deployments that prioritize digital transformation and partnerships to create new business models and revenue. It's no longer just about the technology, but how the technology can drive the entire business into a digital first-future."

The Latest

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

CIOs Elevated to the Boardroom

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis.


The study — based on a survey of 1,000 global technology leaders — demonstrates a monumental shift in the role of the CIO from tech implementor to business leader.

Today's tech leaders are actively involved in creating business strategy: 41% have some level of responsibility for business strategy, while 81% say they are spending more time on innovation. They are using their technology expertise to deliver innovative solutions that drive value and competitive advantage. Over three quarters (77%) are now spending more time selling ideas into the board.

"CIOs are playing a leading role in orchestrating transformation and are stepping up in response to the changing industry dynamics," said Bob Bailkoski, CEO at Logicalis. "Yet, CIOs are faced with challenges to navigate, including concerns of an impending recession and talent shortages. In addition to this, they are experiencing increased pressure to deliver digital-based outcomes for their organizations, giving them more exposure to their boards and requiring a different way of operating."

Orchestrating transformation on the journey towards a digital-first future means CIOs are forging a new path. The four critical areas of focus for CIOs identified in the report include:

Innovation: 50% of CIOs are expected to deliver continuous innovation that elevates and differentiates customer and employee interactions.

Strategy: 80% say that business strategy will become a bigger part of their role over the next two years.

Digital Transformation: 57% say that building and operating new digital platforms is still a core part of their job.

Reimagining Service Partnerships: 74% expect to increase spending on IT outsource management in 2023.

"Modern CIOs are confident in the skills and expertise needed to support their organization's technology structures," said Jon Groves, CEO of Logicalis US. "The CIO's role has shifted and now requires a renewed focus on strategic deployments that prioritize digital transformation and partnerships to create new business models and revenue. It's no longer just about the technology, but how the technology can drive the entire business into a digital first-future."

The Latest

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...