7 Projects Top of Mind for IT Leaders Today

6. Transforming the business

Bobby Cain, SVP and CIO for Schneider Electric North America, lists business transformation as one of his top IT projects, stressing that everything IT does should be "about driving business outcomes, not managing technology."

He also lists initiatives that ready the company for the future, a category of work dubbed J2R, for Journey to Readiness.

"The top IT projects are going to be in either of those two buckets, readiness or actual transformation," Cain adds.

J2R projects include data transformation initiatives aimed at improving data quality, cleanliness, accuracy, and availability. Cain is also rethinking IT roles by creating new career paths for individual contributors, something he believes helps Schneider attract, retain, and develop the talent it needs now and in the years to come.

Recent projects that fall into the second bucket include Schneider's Titan Program, which is centered on a global SAP S/4HANA implementation accompanied by a transformation of the company's pricing and contract management processes.

7. Remaking IT for the future

Devan Dewey, a Boston-area CIO, believes IT itself must be remade, an assertion he detailed in his post "A Mismatch of Scale." Speaking with CIO.com, Dewey explains that IT once had dominion over big enterprise systems but is now in charge of a multitude of "small agents and apps."

"And everything we learned over the past 40 years, the processes and the mindset, are antithetical to this world of small things," he says. "If you look at the portfolio of a typical company four or five years ago, it was a portfolio of large, expensive slow-moving things. Now it's small, cheap fast-moving things. That will take a complete reinvention of how IT works; it requires a reimagining of the pipeline."

Dewey is remaking his IT department for the modern business environment of "small agents and apps." He created a team that in a 45-day sprint stood up new infrastructure designed specifically to deliver small new things and tested it out by successfully getting two items - prototypes built with Claude - through the newly created pipeline.

"Call it a proof of capabilities," Dewey says. His goal now? To continue building this new infrastructure by adding needed components, such as connections to outside data sources, and becoming faster at moving agents and apps through the pipeline.

"It's really about building an architecture suitable for hundreds of small things, which should set us up for future success."