Show me the value: A CIO view on how tech can shape the business

Technology has emerged as a critical priority for businesses, not just for IT. As a result, tech leaders’ responsibilities are expanding into areas outside IT, including customer experience, innovation, operations, procurement, and strategy. But how well CIOs and other tech leaders can forge effective relationships with leaders outside the tech function has become as important as the technology decisions themselves. It’s never just tech. In this interview, Nancy Avila, current CIO of Analog Devices and former CIO and CTO at Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 organizations, including McKesson and Johnson Controls, discusses her approach to working with business leaders with McKinsey senior partner and co-convener of McKinsey’s Women in Tech conference, Gayatri Shenai. Avila describes the importance of transparency, educating leaders on the platforms that undergird innovation, and explicitly linking value to every technology decision. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

This interview is part of a series developed around McKinsey’s Women in Tech event, which spotlights trailblazing women who are not only breaking barriers but also reshaping the tech landscape.

Tech’s tools have changed, but tech’s role—driving business value—has not

Gayatri Shenai: What do you see as tech’s mission, and how have you focused on delivering it?

Nancy Avila: While tech has changed, its role hasn’t. For me, tech has always been about enabling our business with a lens from customer experience and generating revenue while increasing productivity. In the past, that might have been about how to use emails to generate leads, and now it’s about how to use AI to identify next-product-to-buy options. For enterprise productivity, it used to be how to manage core platforms, and now it’s how to use AI and data to elevate the work people do.

I learned early on that when it comes to tech, if you’re not driving value for shareholders, employees, or the customer, then you’re just adding costs for the company. Having a strong portfolio-management process based on business strategy is critical, and you have to assess what you’re doing in terms of how it’s delivering on the company’s goals.

That’s why it’s critical for CIOs to align with their business leadership to drive value. IT does many things operationally that are required to keep our business operating, but it’s important to create a cadence at the executive level to prioritize strategic efforts. We recently implemented a portfolio process that provided a retrospective look at IT projects. It allowed our business to prioritize and align investments to a few programs to improve customer engagement, drive operational resiliency, and simplify operations.

When we looked at the work we were doing in customer experience, we found that we were doing a lot of low-level maintenance such as improving search, CRM [customer relationship management], or the website. But we weren’t doing much strategic investment around engaging with the customer. So we sat down with the CCO [chief customer officer] and worked with him to design products to better interact with customers. The CCO set the priority for us.

Taking the business view extends to core IT products, like ERP [enterprise resource planning]. The CIO not only may own the road map but also must serve as the business architect cross-functionally to work with multiple stakeholders across the business. When we worked to further improve the platform, we worked with the business to prioritize what to focus on based on customer needs. That changed what we did. Initially the focus was on general stabilization, such as improving performance, reporting, and general batch processing. But when looking at the system through the customer lens, we identified a different set of important capabilities, like pricing, invoicing, and forecasting.

Transparency builds business trust

Gayatri Shenai: What are the key skills that have enabled you to succeed in extending your CIO role beyond the IT department?

Nancy Avila: CIOs need to be bold about building a better relationship with business executives, irrespective of where they report. Partnership with the business is absolutely critical for the CIO to be able to lead. For the partnership to work, you have to build trust. You can build trust through transparency and responsible decision-making.

I use transparency to show the business the connection between technology and value. We run organizations that have both strategic and operational objectives. When we want to make foundational investments around cyber infrastructure, for example, I make it clear how this helps protect us from business risk; it’s not just about protecting some “IT asset.” There tends to be much more appreciation of you as a CIO when you’re seen as managing and being responsible with the company’s assets. You build a lot of credibility when you link any ask for IT investment to business value.

In this light, I’ve found that the most fundamental thing the CIO needs to put in place is a strong, strategic portfolio-management process that is based on the business strategy. When you have a portfolio that's separate, business leaders don’t understand why IT is making certain investments. That makes is hard for CIOs to move their and the business’s agenda forward.

IT is typically a pretty large spend at a company. It’s our responsibility to be able to articulate the value that IT delivers for the company. We’re no different from a supply chain function or a sales commercial-operations team: we have the same responsibility for turning every dollar we spend into value.

CIO can be a very lonely role, because most execs don’t understand what we do. So I’ve found it’s important to invest in building up a good network of peers who can keep you honest but also provide support.

Helping the business understand tech decisions

Gayatri Shenai: As the leading technologist for the business, how do you work with business leaders to shape business goals and strategies?

Nancy Avila: To help business leaders shape strategy with technology, you have to help them understand not just what’s possible with technology but also what’s necessary. In some ways, that’s easier today than it used to be, because people broadly understand the importance of tech.

The big shift I’ve seen has been helping the business understand that tech decisions have to be made based on process and experience, not function. Traditionally in the industry, finance has worked separately from ops, which worked separately from customer service. But if you want to use technology to modernize your business, the tech needs to be seamless across all the functions, which means you need to build and maintain core platforms.

You always have well-intended leaders who want to make an impact, but oftentimes they may be only viewing their problem from where they sit in the organization. CIOs can help functional teams see that, if they want to achieve value from technology, they need to think more broadly and can’t simply continue to operate as isolated functions. If you want to automate customer service, for example, you need to be able to access and have visibility into supply chain. Data, tech, and systems need to flow across the business.

Infrastructure as strategy

Gayatri Shenai: How do you think about the underlying technology infrastructure and its role in supporting the business?

Nancy Avila: One of the CIO’s key responsibilities is systems optimization and effective technology operations. That means being able to show value in terms of streamlining operations, which has as a by-product a lower-cost model that can scale and consolidate as the business makes acquisitions.

This is not a “keep the lights on” kind of challenge, because infrastructure is strategic. Today’s data-driven digital solutions and AI enablement require a modern infrastructure that can provide a seamless, reliable experience to our customers and also smooth operations. We're collaborating at the edge with our customers, which requires capabilities that are typically viewed as straight IT costs. But infrastructure is about having the best network and modern cloud capacity that make it seamless to perform your work. You have to link the capabilities and the value, or people will push for something like a data-center consolidation just to cut costs.

You can see that linkage between value and infrastructure with our data strategy, which we’ve shifted since I’ve been here at Analog Devices. We are shifting the previous thinking around building a massive, centralized environment to developing a broader data-mesh environment based on a composable, flexible architecture. When you look at the use cases we want to go after, this more flexible approach will allow us to go much faster in terms of AI and data intelligence.

This strategic view extends to how we manage innovation. We want to use AI agents, but we are putting a framework in place to help navigate what new business value we can go after and what tools we currently have that can do the same thing.

We’re seeing a lot of interest right now in adopting a range of new gen AI tools, but there’s a big difference between “I want a gen AI tool” and “this tool generates value.” We’re acting as a gatekeeper, because if you’re not careful, you’re going to end up in a world with 200 million agents running around without any governance. Going back to tangible use cases and maturity of tech is key.

For example, we were testing out a vendor that built gen AI agents. We experimented for a bit, and then once we knew the AI agent capability was being adopted and scaled by other enterprises, we accelerated our road map to take advantage of these AI agents. We could see it was ready for the enterprise and could unlock business value, which helped us decide to move ahead.