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The Strategic Evolution of IT: From Cost Center to Business Catalyst

Sharon Mandell
Juniper Networks

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership. This shift hasn't just been about changing mindsets — it's about tangible results. Research shows that digital leaders deliver average annual total shareholder returns of 8.1% vs. 4.9% for laggards, highlighting the undeniable link between technological excellence and business success.

As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes. And this mastery isn't accidental — it's the result of deliberate strategies that bridge the traditional gap between technology capabilities and business objectives.

Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Business Objectives

To meaningfully connect technology and business objectives, organizations need practical strategies that move beyond simply acknowledging IT's importance. It's about actively aligning IT initiatives with core business goals, ensuring that technology serves as a catalyst for achieving strategic outcomes. To facilitate this alignment, several approaches should be considered:

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): OKRs go beyond project and portfolio management by focusing on ambitious, measurable business outcomes that drive progress over time. By aligning their work to these outcomes, tech teams can foster a culture of accountability and transparency, ensuring everyone understands how their work supports overall business goals.

Technology Business Management (TBM): TBM analysis provides transparency into IT investments across the organization. This data-driven approach enables more informed discussions about resource allocation and strategic priorities, shifting conversations from cost control to value creation, while demonstrating IT's direct impact on business success.

Cultivating Cross-Functional Ownership: Breaking down silos between technology teams and other departments is crucial. By establishing dedicated cross-functional teams, aligned to business capabilities, tech professionals can collaborate daily and directly with colleagues from marketing, sales, operations and more. This collaborative approach fosters a deeper understanding of shared goals and ensures that technology solutions are developed with a clear awareness of business needs, allowing for seamless and purposeful integration into existing workflows.

Empowering IT Teams with AI-Native Operations

AI is revolutionizing IT operations, enabling teams to shift focus from routine maintenance to driving strategic business goals. By automating repetitive tasks and delivering real-time insights, AI empowers IT to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization, reducing distractions and aligning more closely with broader business objectives.

AI-native networking provides a clear example of this transformation, delivering up to 90% fewer trouble tickets and 9x faster deployments. This enables IT teams to reduce downtime, enhance user experiences, and devote more time to initiatives that improve customer engagement, optimize supply chains, and accelerate business growth.

Beyond networking, AI-driven operations represent a broader shift in how IT projects are approached. The traditional model of large-scale, disruptive rollouts is giving way to more agile, iterative strategies. Continuous monitoring and real-time insights allow organizations to adapt technology solutions to evolving business needs, freeing IT professionals to focus on innovation rather than firefighting.

By embracing AI-driven operations, IT teams can become true enablers of business success, helping organizations achieve measurable outcomes and maintain a competitive edge.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Collaboration

The most successful organizations recognize that technology-driven transformation requires more than just implementing new solutions — it demands an organization-wide cultural shift. This means evolving IT teams from traditional "order-takers" to influential decision-makers who help shape and execute business strategy. The key lies in creating an environment where innovation thrives and tech professionals feel empowered to contribute their unique perspectives to business discussions.

Organizations must invest in both the technical and business acumen of their IT talent. A dual focus on these areas enables teams to better understand the broader business context of their work and contribute more meaningfully to strategic discussions. When IT professionals can speak the languages of both technology and business, they become invaluable partners in driving broader innovation. Success in this area requires a commitment to continuous learning, mentorship programs and creating opportunities for cross-functional collaboration that expose IT teams to diverse business challenges and perspectives.

The Future of IT Leadership

As we look to the future, the role of IT will continue to evolve. The most successful organizations will be those that anticipate the transformative potential of technology and proactively weave it into the DNA of their strategic blueprints. This means:

  • Forging co-ownership between technology and business leaders
  • Sharing critical data insights across business units to drive better decision-making
  • Maintaining a focus on continuous feedback and adaptation
  • Treating technology investments as strategic assets rather than operational expenses

With technology continuing to reshape industries and markets, the question is no longer whether tech professionals should have a seat at the strategic table, but how to maximize its potential and impact on business success. The answer lies in fostering open dialogue, aligning technology with business objectives and demonstrating tangible value. Now is the time for IT leaders to claim their rightful place at the table, unlocking unprecedented possibilities and paving the way for a new era of success.

Sharon Mandell is SVP and Chief Information Officer at Juniper Networks

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The Strategic Evolution of IT: From Cost Center to Business Catalyst

Sharon Mandell
Juniper Networks

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership. This shift hasn't just been about changing mindsets — it's about tangible results. Research shows that digital leaders deliver average annual total shareholder returns of 8.1% vs. 4.9% for laggards, highlighting the undeniable link between technological excellence and business success.

As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes. And this mastery isn't accidental — it's the result of deliberate strategies that bridge the traditional gap between technology capabilities and business objectives.

Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Business Objectives

To meaningfully connect technology and business objectives, organizations need practical strategies that move beyond simply acknowledging IT's importance. It's about actively aligning IT initiatives with core business goals, ensuring that technology serves as a catalyst for achieving strategic outcomes. To facilitate this alignment, several approaches should be considered:

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): OKRs go beyond project and portfolio management by focusing on ambitious, measurable business outcomes that drive progress over time. By aligning their work to these outcomes, tech teams can foster a culture of accountability and transparency, ensuring everyone understands how their work supports overall business goals.

Technology Business Management (TBM): TBM analysis provides transparency into IT investments across the organization. This data-driven approach enables more informed discussions about resource allocation and strategic priorities, shifting conversations from cost control to value creation, while demonstrating IT's direct impact on business success.

Cultivating Cross-Functional Ownership: Breaking down silos between technology teams and other departments is crucial. By establishing dedicated cross-functional teams, aligned to business capabilities, tech professionals can collaborate daily and directly with colleagues from marketing, sales, operations and more. This collaborative approach fosters a deeper understanding of shared goals and ensures that technology solutions are developed with a clear awareness of business needs, allowing for seamless and purposeful integration into existing workflows.

Empowering IT Teams with AI-Native Operations

AI is revolutionizing IT operations, enabling teams to shift focus from routine maintenance to driving strategic business goals. By automating repetitive tasks and delivering real-time insights, AI empowers IT to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization, reducing distractions and aligning more closely with broader business objectives.

AI-native networking provides a clear example of this transformation, delivering up to 90% fewer trouble tickets and 9x faster deployments. This enables IT teams to reduce downtime, enhance user experiences, and devote more time to initiatives that improve customer engagement, optimize supply chains, and accelerate business growth.

Beyond networking, AI-driven operations represent a broader shift in how IT projects are approached. The traditional model of large-scale, disruptive rollouts is giving way to more agile, iterative strategies. Continuous monitoring and real-time insights allow organizations to adapt technology solutions to evolving business needs, freeing IT professionals to focus on innovation rather than firefighting.

By embracing AI-driven operations, IT teams can become true enablers of business success, helping organizations achieve measurable outcomes and maintain a competitive edge.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Collaboration

The most successful organizations recognize that technology-driven transformation requires more than just implementing new solutions — it demands an organization-wide cultural shift. This means evolving IT teams from traditional "order-takers" to influential decision-makers who help shape and execute business strategy. The key lies in creating an environment where innovation thrives and tech professionals feel empowered to contribute their unique perspectives to business discussions.

Organizations must invest in both the technical and business acumen of their IT talent. A dual focus on these areas enables teams to better understand the broader business context of their work and contribute more meaningfully to strategic discussions. When IT professionals can speak the languages of both technology and business, they become invaluable partners in driving broader innovation. Success in this area requires a commitment to continuous learning, mentorship programs and creating opportunities for cross-functional collaboration that expose IT teams to diverse business challenges and perspectives.

The Future of IT Leadership

As we look to the future, the role of IT will continue to evolve. The most successful organizations will be those that anticipate the transformative potential of technology and proactively weave it into the DNA of their strategic blueprints. This means:

  • Forging co-ownership between technology and business leaders
  • Sharing critical data insights across business units to drive better decision-making
  • Maintaining a focus on continuous feedback and adaptation
  • Treating technology investments as strategic assets rather than operational expenses

With technology continuing to reshape industries and markets, the question is no longer whether tech professionals should have a seat at the strategic table, but how to maximize its potential and impact on business success. The answer lies in fostering open dialogue, aligning technology with business objectives and demonstrating tangible value. Now is the time for IT leaders to claim their rightful place at the table, unlocking unprecedented possibilities and paving the way for a new era of success.

Sharon Mandell is SVP and Chief Information Officer at Juniper Networks

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...