Editorial
As the digital landscape evolves, 2025 marks a pivotal year for CIOs — a chance to redefine their priorities and drive meaningful change.
Success hinges on forging stronger partnerships with key stakeholders, striking a balance between cost optimization and transformative investments and embracing technologies like AI, which unlock new opportunities. Equally vital is a CIO’s personal transformation — building deeper business relationships and fostering a culture that thrives on innovation.
This article explores the critical decisions shaping CIO agendas and the strategies needed to lead with impact in 2025.
Engaging Key Stakeholders for Strategic Success
For 2025, CIOs are going to focus on engaging key stakeholders to deliver strategic priorities effectively. These stakeholders include the board of directors, the C-suite, departmental leads and employees. This engagement should also include prioritizing collaboration with the rest of the C-suite to align organizational value and resource allocation. This approach ensures IT priorities reflect both the strategic vision and operational realities of their organization.
Throughout the year, CIOs say engagement should be a continuous effort. CIOs emphasized involving stakeholders in various ways — formally and informally — to ensure planning remains an iterative process.
According to Jim Russell, CIO of Manhattanville University, “I always work to engage the broader C-suite and then balance resources and value to the organization. This should be a regular process, and CIOs need to make sure that new priorities have elbow for room with the ongoing ones from prior years.” The result should be a holistic, responsive planning framework that maintains alignment across all levels of the organization.
FIRST CIO Deb Gildersleeve said, “I try to engage all year in different ways, so this time of year is confirmation not starting from scratch.”
Related Article: AI Agents: How CIOs Can Navigate Risks and Seize Opportunities
What Proves Most Important for CIOs in 2025
For CIOs in 2025, the top priorities revolve around cost reduction, business process improvement and business transformation — closely interconnected objectives that vary slightly in importance depending on the organization. While these goals can overlap, CIOs agree that cost reduction remains paramount, particularly in an era where fiscal discipline aligns directly with technological advancement.
Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) have emerged as critical enablers of cost efficiency and transformation. Dion Hinchcliffe's research (vice president of CIO Practice, The Futurum Group) underscored this trend, placing cost reduction and business process improvement at the forefront, followed closely by business transformation. This sequence aligns with the sentiments of Russell, who emphasized cost reduction as the leading focus, and Joanna Friedman, a fractional manufacturing CIO, who highlighted its role in enabling broader transformation through process improvements.
Interestingly, cloud migration is notably absent as a priority, reflecting its evolution into a foundational expectation rather than a strategic objective. As automation and transformation take center stage, cloud has become the default infrastructure underpinning these initiatives.
Gildersleeve aptly noted that “the balance among these priorities often depends on the specific needs of each department, emphasizing the nuanced approach CIOs must adopt in crafting their strategies for 2025.”
Key Technologies Driving CIO Priorities
In 2025, a diverse set of technologies emerge as priorities to address opportunities like cost reduction, process improvement and business transformation. Cybersecurity and digital transformation top the investment list, with factors such as AI, customer experience (CX), analytics and IT modernization playing pivotal roles in delivering on them. While AI garners significant attention, its importance often depends on its ability to deliver measurable ROI, rather than being pursued simply for its novelty.
Hinchcliffe noted that some organizations are reevaluating cloud strategies, a trend he refers to as "workload re-balancing." Rising cloud costs have led to a minor but notable movement toward repatriating certain workloads to on-premises or hybrid environments. While still a niche strategy, this trend underscores the evolving nature of IT priorities and cost management.
Russell highlighted the need for targeted digital transformation, particularly in finance, where considerations like analytics and customer experience are driving higher ROI than generalized AI efforts. Similarly, fractional CIO Joanna Friedman emphasized robotics, cobots and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs/AGVs) as leaders in cost-saving initiatives, while physics-based AI and machine learning are enabling broader process optimization and transformation.
Automation and AI, including generative AI, are gaining traction as central tools, with Gildersleeve pointing out their relevance alongside software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. These technologies are increasingly interwoven into strategies that balance operational efficiencies with transformative outcomes, reflecting a nuanced approach to innovation in 2025.
Related Article: Navigating the AI Landscape: A CIO's Guide to Success
The Evolution of CIO Leadership
In 2025, CIOs will place a renewed emphasis on personal transformation and deeper business relationships, though the balance between the two varies significantly.
As Dion Hinchcliffe observed, “The expanding scope of CIO responsibilities, coupled with diminishing direct control, makes influence and relationships increasingly critical — even if they don’t always suffice to alleviate the challenges of the role. This highlights the need for CIOs to cultivate resilience and adaptiveness, both personally and professionally.”
For some, personal transformation will take center stage. Joanna Friedman, for instance, is prioritizing a "personal renaissance" now that she's an empty nester, dedicating 70% of her focus to self-renewal while still investing 30% in evolving her business relationships. This mix reflects a recognition that sustainable leadership begins with self-awareness and personal growth.
Others, like Jim Russell, are focusing on external relationships to address institutional challenges, such as sustainability for small universities. By fostering connections with like-minded peers to explore shared services and consortia, Russell is rethinking collaborative models to tackle resource constraints. This approach underscores the importance of external partnerships in driving innovation and operational efficiency.
Meanwhile, Gildersleeve is taking a balanced perspective, emphasizing that personal transformation and deepening business relationships are ongoing processes rather than discrete priorities. Her view acknowledges that both are integral to thriving as a CIO, particularly as the demands of the role continue to evolve in 2025. Whether through personal reinvention, collaboration or influence-building, leaders should recognize that transformation — on all fronts — is essential to navigating the complexities of modern IT leadership.
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Parting Words: Strategic Outlook for CIOs in 2025
As CIOs navigate 2025, their focus will span strategic priorities, technology enablement and personal transformation. Success in this year hinges on balancing cost reduction, business process improvement and transformative investments while building strong partnerships with key stakeholders like the board, C-suite and departmental leads. CIOs are also embracing continuous engagement throughout the year to ensure alignment with organizational goals. This will turn year-end planning into a confirmation step rather than a fresh start.
Emerging technologies such as AI, customer experience tools, analytics and IT modernization are central to achieving these objectives. While AI is critical, its adoption hinges on delivering measurable ROI rather than being pursued for novelty. Notably, cloud migration has shifted from a strategic priority to a default expectation, with a growing trend of “workload re-balancing” as organizations optimize cloud costs.
On a personal level, CIOs are prioritizing their own growth and fostering deeper relationships. With the increasing demands and reduced control in their roles, CIOs are focusing on personal renewal and external collaborations to sustain effectiveness. As 2025 unfolds, CIOs will recognize that transformation — whether through technology, partnerships or self-growth — is vital to thriving in an era of complexity and rapid change. This multifaceted strategy underscores the adaptability required to lead IT innovation and deliver impactful results.
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