The role of CIOs and CTOs in 2025: When technology becomes enterprise economics

From years of working closely with CIOs and CTOs, it’s clear that 2025 is a promising moment for technology leadership, because enterprises finally are realising that ‘digital transformation’ today is really just a correction of years of accumulated complexity. Technology conversations are shifting away from tools and toward fundamentals: Clarity of purpose, simplicity of systems, and sustained value creation. 

When constraints forced better discipline

In the early days of enterprise computing, every technology choice mattered.  Limited compute, limited resources and limited budgets forced us to think carefully. Somewhere along the way, abundance replaced thoughtfulness, and we started compensating for weak processes and unclear thinking by throwing more tools, more vendors, and more layers at the problem.

Every major technological shift, from client-server to the internet to cloud, created the same temptation – Adopt first, understand later. The organisations that suffered were not the ones that moved slowly ...