IT modernization: Still a make-or-break project for CIOs
Sumit Johar has been modernizing BlackLine’s IT environment since becoming CIO of the software company in early 2024. As a longtime IT leader, Johar has plenty of experience overhauling tech stacks, but he says the work has taken on new meaning — and urgency — in the AI era.
Sumit Johar has been modernizing BlackLine’s IT environment since becoming CIO of the software company in early 2024. As a longtime IT leader, Johar has plenty of experience overhauling tech stacks, but he says the work has taken on new meaning — and urgency — in the AI era.
“The definition of modernization has literally switched in the last two to three years,” he says. “Suddenly everything that you built in the last few years looks like legacy, because the SaaS model, which we have been using for the last 10 to 15 years, there is an opportunity now to totally change that and modernize with AI and for AI.”
Johar is doing just that, surveying the company’s SaaS portfolio, particularly zeroing in on point solutions, asking whether each is worth the cost, whether it delivers true business value, or whether IT can use AI to build a service better suited to his company’s needs.
At the same time, AI is changing how workers interact with technology, he says, enabling people to query applications via natural language and chat, which has his IT team considering which applications may need to be modernized or abandoned altogether as a result.
Take, for example, dashboards. “We built dashboards because there was no other or better way to report on your data,” he says. “Now I can simply ask a question and get an answer, which is what I was interested in anyways. So if I have my ERP and CRM talk to me in a human language, I’m happy with that. That’s modernization.”
As a result, he adds, “some of us might be getting rid of [our dashboards], and some might be slowly reducing the dashboarding tools we have.”
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 05/10/2026
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Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
IT governance rarely fails for lack of technology. It fails for lack of clarity about who decides what. A story like this one is usually the visible symptom of an operating model that no longer fits the size of the organisation, and those models get changed before the pressure arrives, not after.
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
The classic mistake is confusing the plan with the execution. A three-year roadmap gets approved in a two-hour committee and nobody revisits it until there is a problem. Plans that work get reviewed every quarter and corrected without drama; the ones that do not get defended instead.
What to watch
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- 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.
How I read this entry
If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not a plan. It is an honest inventory of what is already running and what it costs to keep it alive. It almost always turns out that the budget for the new thing comes from switching off something old that nobody wants to name, and that conversation decides whether the project lives.
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.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
