Three Top Focus Areas for CIOs in 2025

As we do each year, we are kicking off 2025 by conducting our annual Leadership Perspective Survey, which asks our C-level community members about their top priorities, challenges and investments for the year. We follow up our survey with hundreds of conversations with individual CIOs to dive deeper into their priorities. 

This quantitative and qualitative data helps drive the topics and content at all of our community gatherings, ensuring our events are relevant and timely for CIOs. We have early data and have already had many conversations, which enables us to provide a high-level look at what we believe CIOs will focus on in 2025. (Stay tuned for our detailed survey results in a few weeks.)

From legacy technology and the need for digital transformation and from driving growth and innovation to demonstrating the value of IT, CIOs face a number of priorities competing for their time and resources. They also have a big opportunity and challenge in adopting AI in a way that can be governed, measured, and productive for the business.

With this in mind, here is an overview of 3 themes for CIOs in 2025:

1. Collaborating for Co-Ownership to Drive Digital Innovation

Creating operational efficiencies and optimizing costs have been two top priorities for CIOs as business leaders for the past few years. But according to the Gartner CIO Innovation Leadership Primer for 2024, organizations that have been driving efficiencies and optimizing through retooling need to shift to “focus on innovating their business models, their capabilities and technological deployments.”

This focus on innovation might require CIOs to establish new competencies and processes for their organizations. One approach to this is collaborating across the organization to prioritize activities and projects around innovation. In the same Leadership Primer, Gartner reports that “the ongoing evolution of the CIO leadership role requires a strong emphasis on innovation by creating an innovation competency with a sustained focus on driving positive change and scaling the ideas successfully to create lasting impact.”
 

1. Empowering Business Technologists

CIOs recognize that some innovation and optimization are taking place outside of IT, and thus they need to find ways to empower and collaborate with business technologists who are not under their purview. According to the Gartner 2025 CIO Agenda, CIOs who are digital outperformers “take a two-pronged approach to growth that makes it easier for other CxOs to lead digital with them and for partners outside of IT to build digital capabilities together with IT.”

Empowering technologists across the business will not only contribute to the success of digital initiatives, it also provides another way to bring forward innovative ideas, making this focus area closely related to driving digital innovation inside the organization.
 

1. Focusing on Architecture and Innovation

To bring innovation to life and maximize digital opportunities, CIOs will also focus on the architecture of their technology systems. This is a complex task as many CIOs in our communities say they have inherited legacy technologies or are integrating technologies from an acquisition. Some executives are trying to simplify or modernize their IT infrastructure, which can be a multi-year effort.

But CIOs recognize that to achieve the maximum value of something like AI, they need to have the right foundation in place. According to the Gartner 2025 CIO Agenda, “In 2025, more than 80% of CIOs plan to make investments in foundational capabilities, including cybersecurity, GenAI, business intelligence and data analytics, and integration technologies like APIs.” 

As part of their role as a leader across the business, this year CIOs will focus on how to collaborate to drive innovation, empower business technologists, and ensure their architecture is aligned with their long-term strategies for growth.

We look forward to a new year of bringing C-level IT leaders together to collaborate, share and learn from each other on these critical focus areas. To participate in a community, apply to join your regional CIO Community, or if you are already a member, sign in to MyEvanta to check out and register for your upcoming community programs.