The CIOs InformationWeek profiled this yr shared a standard actuality: Main IT means main change — usually massive change. Throughout industries, CIOs described a job that extends past instruments and programs, calling for enterprise judgment, change administration and the flexibility to construct belief — all amid a yr of head-spinning AI developments and geopolitical uncertainty.
“There are all the time pressures across the anticipated enterprise worth you need to obtain within the enterprise relative to all of the know-how developments,” Shelia Anderson, government vp and chief info and digital officer at Unum Group. “How do you leverage these new and rising applied sciences to drive worth by way of innovation?”
Simply as putting have been the paths that introduced these leaders to their roles. Whereas some rose by way of the IT ranks, others arrived from exterior conventional profession tracks, with backgrounds in product growth, operations, engineering and stock management administration.
No matter the place their careers started, these CIOs shared a transparent view of what efficient IT management requires immediately: clear objectives tied to enterprise worth, shut cross-team collaboration, and sensible guardrails for deploying rising applied sciences comparable to agentic AI.
Two profiles on this assortment highlight IT leaders exterior the CIO function — a chief working officer and chief safety officer — who echoed comparable themes. Like their CIO friends, they emphasised the necessity for management that spans know-how and the enterprise.
“I really like know-how, however I additionally love technique. I really like enterprise,” stated Nate Baxter, president and COO at ScottsMiracle-Gro. “Coming with that technical background, I might take advanced issues and distill them into helpful factors … and get a corporation to rally round and ship outcomes on.”
As CIOs plan forward for 2026, there’s worth in inspecting how friends have addressed challenges starting from AI deployments and upskilling workers to securing enterprise information and ROI.
