What CIOs Learn Only After Living Through Large Transformations
Over the years, I have seen organisations invest heavily in digital transformation—ERP upgrades, advanced planning tools, analytics platforms, IoT initiatives, and automation.
Yet, despite all this effort, many leaders quietly admit one thing:
“We have systems, but decisions haven’t really improved.”
This gap between digital intent and operational reality is where most transformations struggle—not because of technology, but because execution happens in environments far more complex than strategy documents assume.
The First Misconception: “Once the System Is Live, Things Will Improve”
Most transformation programs follow a familiar pattern:
A strong vision is created at leadership level
A system is selected and implemented
Go-live is celebrated
Reality sets in
What follows is not failure—but workarounds.
Planners export data to Excel.
Plant teams override system recommendations.
Sales commits without consulting supply.
The system technically works, but the organisation does not trust it.
Why?
Because systems are often designed assuming ideal behaviour, while execution happens under:
Capacity constraints
Supplier unreliability
Demand volatility
Human judgement
CIOs who have lived through this realise that trust is the real currency of transformation, not functionality.
Where Strategy Breaks Down on the Ground
Let’s take a common example: forecast-driven planning.
At a strategic level, leadership expects:
A single forecast
Alignment across sales, supply chain, and finance
Better service levels and inventory control
On the ground, what actually happens is different:
Sales forecasts aspirational numbers
Supply plans conservatively due to capacity risks
Plants buffer with inventory “just in case”
Finance questions both
The system shows one number, but decisions are still taken outside it.
This is not resistance—it is self-preservation.
Experienced CIOs learn that systems must absorb organisational reality, not overwrite it.
The CIO’s Real Role: Translator, Not Implementer
In large organisations, the CIO’s most critical role is not selecting tools—it is translating between worlds:
Translating business ambition into system logic
Translating plant constraints into planning rules
Translating data into decisions people believe in
This requires deep involvement beyond IT:
Sitting with plant managers to understand bottlenecks
Understanding why planners distrust certain numbers
Knowing where exceptions are legitimate and where discipline is needed
Transformations fail when CIOs stay at the architecture level.
They succeed when CIOs engage at the decision level.
Why Visibility Alone Does Not Create Value
Many organisations proudly say they have dashboards.
But dashboards answer only one question:
“What happened?”
The harder questions are:
What should we do now?
What trade-offs are we making?
What happens if we choose speed over cost—or service over inventory?
Without this, planning systems become reporting tools, not decision systems.
Seasoned CIOs push systems to:
Simulate scenarios
Highlight constraints
Quantify impact of choices
That is when conversations change—from blame to decision-making.
Standardisation vs Reality: A Lesson Learned the Hard Way
Global organisations often pursue standardisation for good reasons:
Control
Scalability
Governance
But over-standardisation ignores a simple truth:
No two plants operate under identical constraints.
A plant supplying export markets behaves differently from one supplying local demand.
A mature factory differs from a newly commissioned one.
Experienced CIOs learn to standardise the backbone, not the behaviour:
Common data models
Common planning cadence
Flexible execution rules
This balance is difficult—but essential for adoption.
Change Management Is Not Communication
One of the most underestimated aspects of transformation is change management.
Town halls, emails, and training sessions are necessary—but insufficient.
Real change happens when:
Incentives align with system behaviour
KPIs reinforce collaboration
Leaders use the system themselves
When senior leadership continues to take decisions outside the system, the message is clear—the system is optional.
CIOs who succeed insist on one thing:
“If it’s not in the system, it’s not a decision.”
What CIOs Start Doing Differently After Experience
After living through one or two large transformations, CIOs tend to shift focus:
From feature lists → decision quality
From speed of implementation → speed of adoption
From system usage → business outcomes
They ask sharper questions:
Which decisions does this system improve?
Where will people override it—and why?
How will this help the organisation scale without firefighting?
These questions change everything.
A Closing Thought for CIOs and Leaders
Digital transformation is not about replacing people with systems.
It is about freeing people to make better decisions.
When systems respect reality, when data leads to action, and when leadership uses the same tools they expect others to use—transformation stops being a project and becomes a capability.
That is when strategy finally meets execution.