CIO Playbook In 2025 & What’s next in 2026 —and the Spend Visibility Gap Holding It Back
In its sixth year, Forbes' CIO Next List recognizes 50 technology leaders across sectors who "exemplify excellence" in C-level tech roles. [Becker's Hospital Review]
What's striking isn't just the variety of industries---it's how consistent the underlying achievements are.
Across the most visible examples and public write-ups, "CIO Next" leaders tend to be celebrated for a specific kind of leadership: turning technology into measurable enterprise outcomes. Not "digital transformation" as a slogan---but transformation as a repeatable operating system.
Here are the themes I see---and why they're all, quietly, finance problems as much as they are technology problems.
1) Measurable impact beats "digital transformation" theater
The common thread is quantifiable results: faster change execution, improved resilience, reduced risk, cost savings, and simplified operations. In healthcare examples alone, leaders are credited for large-scale modernization initiatives, security improvements, and annual savings created through automation and consolidation. [Becker's Hospital Review]
The modern CIO is increasingly expected to answer:
- What did we improve?
- How fast did we deliver it?
- What risk did we remove?
- What cost did we take out?
- What outcomes did the business actually see?
This is where many CIO organizations struggle---not because they aren't doing the work, but because the evidence is scattered across budgets, contracts, projects, towers, vendors, and tools.
Altios ITFM positioning: "Prove impact with a living spend-to-outcome system."
Altios can become the layer that connects IT's operating reality (projects, vendors, services, talent) to business-facing narratives (savings, speed, resilience, value delivered).
2) Modernization is now a portfolio---so leaders need portfolio economics
Modernization isn't one program anymore. It's a portfolio of decisions: cloud migrations, app rationalization, data center consolidation, legacy sunset, and process redesign. Public examples highlight exactly this pattern: consolidating data centers, sunsetting large numbers of legacy systems, and running major modernization investments. [Becker's Hospital Review]
The hidden challenge: modernization is funded by---and constrained by---legacy spend that won't die on its own.
CIOs need to continuously answer:
- What is the "run" cost of legacy vs modern?
- Where are we double-paying during transition?
- Which investments unlock real savings vs just shift spend categories?
- How do we prioritize modernization when budgets are tight?
Altios ITFM positioning: "Modernization funding engine: identify, harvest, and reinvest savings."
Altios can make modernization a finance-grade process: map baseline spend, quantify "run vs change," track the savings pipeline, and show reinvestment options.
3) AI is moving from pilots to operations---and ROI scrutiny is rising
Many honorees are recognized for deploying AI to improve workflows and decisions at scale. [Becker's Hospital Review] The key word is "operationalization": moving beyond experimentation into measurable outcomes.
But as AI scales, so do questions:
- Where is AI spend accumulating (tools, vendors, infra, services)?
- What's the unit cost of an AI-enabled workflow?
- Are we duplicating AI spend across functions?
- What governance exists for value realization?
Altios ITFM positioning: "AI spend governance and value tracking---without slowing innovation."
Altios can help CIOs create an "AI portfolio view" that ties AI initiatives to costs, owners, expected outcomes, and realized results---so the CIO can scale AI confidently and credibly.
4) Security and resilience are now board-level value metrics
Leaders are increasingly celebrated not only for innovation---but for reducing enterprise risk: fewer vulnerabilities, faster incident response, and stronger operational resilience. [Becker's Hospital Review]
The financial implication is often missed: resilience is expensive, but downtime and incidents are more expensive. CIOs have to defend security investments while proving they're reducing risk exposure.
Altios ITFM positioning: "Security spend transparency + risk-aligned prioritization."
Altios can help connect security investments to cost drivers and outcomes---enabling clear showback and rational prioritization (especially across overlapping tools and vendors).
5) Speed of delivery is becoming a signature KPI
The best CIO orgs are becoming high-throughput systems: faster changes, shorter cycles, fewer bottlenecks. Public examples include high rates of change execution and cycle-time improvements. [Becker's Hospital Review]
But speed without financial control creates a different problem: uncontrolled sprawl.
Altios ITFM positioning: "Move fast---without losing financial control."
Altios can support speed by eliminating manual reporting cycles and replacing them with near-real-time visibility and accountability.
What's next in 2026:
- Decision-grade transparency (not more dashboards) - What-if questions & Answers enabled by Conversational Analytics grounded in clean data
- AI cost governance as a first-class discipline
- Modernization funding loops: optimize → reinvest → reduce run-cost → repeat
- CIO--CFO alignment becomes a competitive advantage
This is why ITFM is evolving from "finance tooling" into a core CIO operating capability.