Mohan Sankararaman calls the old approach to technology-driven transformation — the kind of change that lands every few years and reshapes the organization in one push — a trap.
Mohan Sankararaman calls the old approach to technology-driven transformation — the kind of change that lands every few years and reshapes the organization in one push — a trap.
Every CIO is under similar pressure to rethink change management for the AI era. Wanda Wallace, managing partner at Leadership Forum, has advised CIOs on change management for years, and she thinks the job itself hasn’t changed much.
“The hardest and most critical aspect of making change happen and stick is convincing people to adopt a new approach,” she says. “AI doesn’t change that need or that process. It is a human-to-human dynamic.”
Talk to the practitioners and researchers closest to the work, and a version of her view emerges again and again. What has changed is how many things are competing for an organization’s limited capacity to absorb them — AI chief among them. Here are five hard truths IT leaders face about change management today.
Ashish Parmar, CIO of Standard Industries, a global industrial conglomerate with more than 20,000 employees across roughly 50 countries, has watched the nature of transformation shift beneath him. In the past, he says, change was treated like a project with a start date and an end date — whether the trigger was a new ERP system, a reorg, or a cost-cutting mandate. That model doesn’t hold anymore.
“Today, change is continuous,” Parmar says. “Our strategy is focused on building resilience and adaptability rather than getting to a single destination.”
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 25/08/2026
Continue reading at the original source →
Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
There is a wide gap between a company that has technology projects and one that has a technology strategy. The first accumulates initiatives; the second decides what it will not do. Moves like this are usually the moment somebody at the top finally wrote down the list of what gets left out.
I read it looking for coordination cost. Every technology decision splits work across areas that do not report to each other, and that is where the return leaks out. If nobody defined who resolves it when two areas disagree, the project already has its grounding date set.
What usually goes wrong
Where I see this fail most is in the second half of the year. The announcement is made with energy, the team gets assembled, and eight months later the person driving it changed role or company. Without an institutional owner, not just a personal one, the programme fades without anybody formally cancelling it.
What to watch
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
- Whether business metrics appear or only delivery metrics — cost per transaction beats percentage complete.
- The real calendar of contracts and renewals: that is where you see whether the move was strategic or was an expiry date.
How I read this entry
I would treat it less as a technology story and more as a market signal. If one player moves this way, in twelve to eighteen months the rest will have to answer something. Better to decide now, calmly, what that answer will be, rather than improvise it when a client asks.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
