Building a Business-Centric IT Stack

Organizations today generate and collect massive volumes of data, and data products have become critical for decision making. A robust and scalable infrastructure is essential for managing this information effectively and safely. 

At the same time, chief information officers face the challenge of balancing innovation with the stability and security needed for business-critical systems. The goal is to create a safe environment that allows developers to deploy new technologies without compromising production workloads or overall system integrity. 

A strategic, risk-based approach helps CIOs manage the balance between prioritizing security measures with the need for innovation. “CIOs must foster a culture of innovation and embrace agile methodologies as well as create safe sandbox environments for continuous engineering practices,” Armando Franco, director of business transformation at TEKsystems, says via email.  

He says CIOs must build diverse IT teams with a range of skills and perspectives to help adapt to changes in the business and technical environments. “Cloud computing is leading the way in building flexible and scalable IT stacks,” Franco explains. 

By its very nature, the cloud platform was designed to allow organizations to be as flexible and scalable as possible by providing on-demand resources and allowing automation to determine when and how to scale, depending on business rules. 

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“This is often referred to as elasticity and is one of the drivers for cloud adoption,” he says. 

Pedro Portela, head of consulting at Indicium, says he agrees leveraging the cloud offers flexibility, giving CIOs the option of scalable innovation while relying on the secure-by-design infrastructure offered by the leading cloud providers. “Collaboration with business units is another key element for continuous innovation,” he says via email. 

By working closely with other departments, CIOs can align IT innovations with the organization’s broader goals, ensuring that technological advancements directly contribute to business-critical functions. 

Avoiding Pitfalls  

Transitioning to a business-centric IT stack can introduce risks such as security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and integration challenges. 

To mitigate these risks, CIOs should ensure there are robust governance policies in place before transitioning, then follow it up by conducting thorough risk assessments, implementing security measures, and ensuring compliance with the governance policies. 

Portela cautions that one of the primary risks is misalignment between IT and business goals, where IT investments may not directly address business needs. This could lead to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and even strained relationships as frustration builds between teams. 

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“CIOs can mitigate this by fostering strong collaboration between IT and business leaders, ensuring that every technology decision is aligned with the company’s strategic objectives and that IT initiatives are evaluated based on their business impact,” he says.  

KPIs for Measuring Success  

To measure the impact of their IT stack on business outcomes, CIOs should align IT performance metrics with broader organizational goals, ensuring that technology investments contribute directly to value creation, efficiency, and growth. 

“The impact of their IT stack on business outcomes can be measured by aligning IT performance metrics with broader organizational goals,” Portela says. 

By tracking the right KPIs, CIOs can evaluate how effectively their IT stack supports critical business objectives such as revenue generation, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and innovation. “Any good plan includes a strong measurement framework,” Portela says, emphasizing the role of KPIs in providing insights into progress and fueling the next round of “How can we improve?” discussions. 

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Tracking results and learning from systems that generate value fosters collaboration between business lines and IT -- this is where a robust IT monitoring platform becomes crucial. “Understanding value creation from the perspective of business leaders enables CIOs to better align IT strategies with business capacity improvements and demonstrate the measurable value IT brings,” Portela says.  

Additionally, measuring the effectiveness of data products -- through metrics like usage rates, accuracy, and impact on decision-making -- ensures that the IT stack delivers actionable insights and supports data-driven decisions. 

Franco says that CIOs can measure the impact of their IT stack on business outcomes by tracking KPIs such as system uptime, incident response times, and project delivery time, bugs in code, and user experience. “These metrics help assess the productivity and effectiveness of IT operations,” he says.  

Additionally, CIOs can use objectives and key results to track the impact of their IT stack. “CIOs can build business objectives that can be delivered upon by IT key results and therefore giving a level of measurement on what business objectives are being met,” Franco explains. 

Future-Proofing the IT Stack 

Portela explains that a future-proof IT stack is a stack that can adapt, and to future-proof it, CIOs must stay informed about emerging technologies and industry trends -- this is non-negotiable. 

He says a key strategy is embracing cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices, which provides the agility to scale resources and services on demand, streamlining development and deployment processes to accelerate innovation and improve system reliability. 

Cloud platforms also enable quick adoption of new technologies, as they frequently offer access to the latest tools and services without requiring significant infrastructure overhauls. 

“This ensures that the IT stack can evolve as business needs and technology trends shift,” he says.