The CIO's 10-step guide to digital transformation
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The CIO's 10-step guide to digital transformation
Matt Saunders
Published on 16 July 2025
8 min read
Matt Saunders
Published on 16 July 2025
8 min read
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Step 1. Understand your organisation's digital maturity
Step 2. Define your objectives and develop your strategy
Step 3. Embrace cloud computing solutions
Step 4. Collect and act on data
Step 5. Cultivate a digital culture
Step 6. Focus on cybersecurity
Step 7. Measure success and adapt
Step 8. Collaborate across departments
Step 9. Stay agile and innovative
Step 10. Optimise value delivery
Digital transformation FAQs
Today's CIOs face more complexity than ever, balancing cybersecurity, AI integration, and evolving business demands. We break down the digital transformation journey into 10 clear, actionable steps.
Why digital transformation is essential for modern CIOs and business growth
With businesses frequently re-inventing themselves and having to adapt to new markets and competitors out-innovating them, digital transformation has become more than just a broad term overarching gradual change; it's a survival necessity for businesses striving to remain competitive and continue to provide genuine business value to customers.
By making the best use of new digital technology, AI included, you can help to provide improved services, response times and personalised experiences which enhance customer satisfaction and further embeds customer loyalty.With mature big data analysis tools, you can identify trends and patterns to help make predictions about future outcomes more accurately. And when it all goes to plan, new revenue streams and improved technology make scaling and flexibility more straightforward.
In the past, many chief information officers’ (CIO) roles were primarily focused around keeping a steady hand on IT functions, focusing on maintaining and optimising IT systems, ensuring network security, and managing on-premise servers or data centres. But times have changed. Today, CIOs are also tasked with the daunting prospect of steering the IT organisation through digital transformation.
With IT now being a core part of any modern organisation, it means that CIOs are now front and centre of driving change in how your organisation operates and delivers value to customers, working at a strategic level amongst the C-suite to modernise the company. Digital transformation isn't just about using the latest technologies, paying down technical debt, or improving infrastructure. At its core is the need to drive growth, enhance the customer experience, improve quality, and contribute to achieving the business's goals. In this blog, we walk you through the 10 steps to navigate that strategic journey.
Steering the transformation ship
Are you getting started with digital transformation, or have you kicked off a project but lost momentum? In this blog, we've compiled a handy checklist of 10 steps to get your digital transformation on the right track. While it's not exhaustive, this list should keep you on track and keep transformation overwhelm at bay.
Step 1. Understand your organisation's digital maturity
Take steps to understand your current IT environment, including casting an objective eye on your legacy systems, infrastructure and capabilities. Is your organisation using modern tools and techniques to innovate quickly and get things done? Conduct a digital maturity assessment to identify the capability gaps.
We can help conduct your DevOps and ITSM ITIL® 4 digital maturity assessments and support you with the steps to take once you have evaluated your current state.
Step 2. Define your objectives and develop your strategy
Figure out what you want from the transformation: whether that's operational efficiency, faster time-to-market, better customer experience, revenue growth, or something else. Then, work with your fellow IT and business stakeholders to build a strategy and the outline of a step-by-step plan to help you get there. This approach will ensure you plan, prioritise, and implement new initiatives effectively, aligning with your organisational goals. But remember, few plans survive an encounter with the enemy, so be ready to measure, reflect, adjust and adapt.
Step 3. Embrace cloud computing
Being able to spin up infrastructure quickly and independently is a powerful move in digital transformation. The slow speed of modernising infrastructure without this can be a death knell on a digital transformation, where it's key to be able to move flexibly and scale appropriately. Hybrid and multi-cloud models can reduce the dependence on a single cloud and bridge the gap with any data sovereignty issues, and it all opens the door to emerging technologies like AI and machine learning for your teams.
Step 4. Collect and act on data
Data is imperative for any digital transformation to be successful. Find the right things to measure to show whether you've improved, and pay attention to them. Give other areas of the business the ability to collect and analyse data, which can help them gain the insights needed to drive and inform decision-making. With a unified data architecture and tools that democratise data access across departments, you can support business leaders in making data-driven quality decisions.
Step 5. Cultivate a digital culture
To compete in the market, your organisation must introduce and support lifelong learning for your teams as part of an experimental culture that fosters knowledge sharing, calculated risk-taking, and continuous improvement. Supporting upskilling and digital literacy across all levels is a big enabler of innovation. With AI, regulations, and politics all impacting the way we think and act, don't let your culture fall behind.
Step 6. Focus on cybersecurity
The proliferation of malicious technology and rogue actors, bolstered by innovative and destructive use in the age of AI, poses a significant risk to organisations and their customers. Cybersecurity must be at the heart of your transformation, with strategies for zero-trust architecture, robust user verification and authorisation. Be sure to keep educating your workforce, promoting awareness of the latest digital threats and social engineering tricks which you can't afford to be tripped up by.
Step 7. Measure success and adapt
Implementing initiatives and hoping for the best is not enough. Your digital transformation strategy needs to incorporate rigorous and continuous measurement to understand success and failure and find opportunities for improvement. Use metrics to track progress, measure outcomes, and identify weak spots. Incorporate regular reviews to ensure alignment with business goals and create the space to pivot if there's a shift in priorities or the landscape you're operating in.
Step 8. Collaborate across departments
Siloed working is prohibitive to digital transformation efforts because digital transformation is impossible without a shared vision across all levels of the organisation and truly cross-functional collaboration across technical and business teams. Fragmented, department-specific projects with differing and possibly conflicting priorities and objectives seriously hamper digital transformation efforts. Part of your job is to advocate strongly for integrated teams, adoption of new processes and methodologies and co-ownership of digital initiatives.
Step 9. Stay agile and innovative
It might sound like a given, but it's important not to get set in your ways once transformation efforts are underway and assume that a multi-year plan is locked in for the duration. You need to be agile by frequently reflecting on where you've got to and making sure that your carefully-planned next step is indeed the correct one based on the knowledge you've gained thus far. Leverage them to implement iterative digital change. Keep encouraging experimentation, pilot new ideas at a small scale, and listen to feedback and accept and adapt when it's agreed you're not quite on the correct path.
Step 10. Optimise value delivery
Lastly, digital transformation is not just about growth or efficiency. Ultimately, it should centre on enhancing customer and stakeholder value. That means using technology to meet evolving expectations—whether that's faster service, personalised experiences, or greater convenience. Remember to keep the customer at the heart of your strategy, understand their evolving needs, and use technology to drive measurable improvements.
Digital transformation FAQs
How can CIOs ensure cybersecurity remains a priority during digital transformation?
CIOs should embed cybersecurity into every stage of transformation, starting with a zero-trust architecture, robust user verification, and strong authorisation protocols. Staff must be continuously educated on the latest threats, and security strategies must be reviewed regularly. Staying ahead of evolving threats is crucial, especially as new technologies like AI may introduce additional risks.
Why is cross-departmental collaboration critical to successful digital transformation?
Digital transformation requires a shared vision and integrated efforts across all departments. Siloed teams with fragmented priorities can seriously hinder progress. CIOs should champion collaboration between IT and business units, encourage adoption of new processes, and foster co-ownership of digital initiatives to ensure alignment to maximise the impact of transformation.
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Written by
DevOps Lead
From a background as a Linux sysadmin, Matt is an authority in all things DevOps. At Adaptavist and beyond, he champions DevOps ways of working, helping teams maximise people, process and technology to deliver software efficiently and safely.
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