Behind the Firewall: Notes of a Punk CIO

Enterprise IT is dead—Long live Enterprise IT!

Remember when IT departments were the gatekeepers of all things tech? When you needed a meeting, a budget review, and three approvals just to get access to a dashboard? Well, that era is over. That era is over—not because IT stepped back, but because the world moved on. 

Business moves faster, expectations are higher, and the old “command-and-control”, “demand-and-supply” IT model simply can’t keep up. Today, business teams don’t wait around—they grab low-code platforms and SaaS tools, assembling their own tech stacks like medieval peasants overthrowing the castle. And the old-school CIO? Stuck in the middle, overwhelmed, watching chaos unfold—pulled in one direction by demands for more governance and in the other by complaints that IT is in the way.

Enterprise IT, as we knew it, is dead. But before we mourn, let’s talk about its reincarnation—because those who don’t evolve will be left guarding a kingdom that no longer exists.

The great IT cost squeeze: more for less (or just less?)

CIOs are under constant fire. Budgets are shrinking, expectations are skyrocketing — fueled by every trend-chasing leader who just discovered AI, cloud, or automation. Invited or not, “Efficiency experts” show up every around the corner with blur stories demanding “50% cost reduction through digital transformation”, conveniently ignoring small details like reality.

The wrong move? It’s very tempting to slash IT down to a skeleton crew, hoping that chatbots and “self-service automation” will magically run an entire enterprise. Spoiler: they won’t.

The right move? Smarter use of technology funds that keeps IT relevant. What to consider?:

1. Kill what’s not essential

• Are you still running on-prem servers just because “we’ve always done it that way”? Time to rethink.
• But are you blindly moving everything to the cloud because of hype? Even worse.
• Moving to a new data center—or the cloud—is like moving to a new home. It’s the perfect chance to throw out the junk, not just pack everything up and dump it in a new place. But here’s the thing—you don’t actually need a data center relocation to do a proper spring cleaning. IT should be cleaning up its tech stack continuously, and challenge businesses to do the same

2. Cloud is not a religion—It’s a tool

• Cloud is fantastic for scalability, global reach, and most importantly for modern app development. But if someone tells you “cloud-first, cloud-only” without any context, hand them a bill for the last five surprise cost spikes from your hyperscaler.
• Legacy workloads, data-heavy applications, or highly latency-sensitive systems? Often better on-prem.

3. Invest where it matters

• Security: Because “oops” is not a valid cybersecurity strategy.
• Platforms over projects: Stop funding one-off IT projects and start enabling scalable digital ecosystems.
• Tech fluency: Technology is only a competitive advantage if it’s effectively adopted and used by the organization. Having the latest technology on the shelf is just a sunk cost with no return and does nothing if employees don’t know how to use them efficiently.

Tech Fluency: The blurring lines between Business & IT

Look at your organization: does “business” still exist without technology? Not really. Do you know where Business ends and IT starts, or the other way around? Very difficult to tell. The distinction between “business roles” and “IT roles” is vanishing. It’s not that everyone suddenly loves debugging code; it’s that tech fluency is becoming table stakes for doing businesses and business people have easier access to technology than ever:

• Finance pros are building automated forecasting models in Python.
• Marketing teams are running AI-driven segmentation without calling IT.
• HR is implementing self-service workflow automation faster than your ServiceDesk team can approve a ticket.

Your business people don’t need to be coders—but they must understand technology’s pivotal role in delivering business services and they are very successful in that. What does this mean for IT?

The new IT Playbook for 2025: Adapt or fade away

1. From “IT Provider” to “Tech Enabler”

• IT’s new job isn’t to build everything—it’s to empower others to build responsibly. Think Centers for Enablement (C4Es) instead of just Centers of Excellence (CoEs).
• Set up governance frameworks and stop being the Department of No.
• Build, energize, and guide communities around technology—the best IT teams don’t block progress; they create the conditions for “crowd-sourcing” without reinventing the wheel (or setting everything on fire).

2. From “Shadow IT” to “Empowered IT”

• The business will continue to buy technology. If your company hires smart people, they will always find a way – this is why they are called smart. Your choice is to be part of their tech story or just get blamed when things blow up.
• Help them do it securely and efficiently instead of pretending you can stop them.

3. From “IT Talent” to “Business-Technology Hybrid”

Forget hiring only for technical skills. So what are (some of) the new must-have skills?

• Cognitive flexibility (because it’s fast out there and tech will change weekly).
• Storytelling and political savviness (because facts alone don’t win battles).
• Design thinking (because nobody wants to use a system that feels like tax filing).

4. From “Enterprise IT” to “Ecosystem IT”

• IT isn’t the owner of tech anymore—it’s the orchestrator, the “builder-broker”.
• The future IT department is a mix of all ways and forms of technology services from all possible … and smart governance.
• And yes, including on-prem; on-prem still has its place — not as a legacy burden, but as a strategic choice for the right workloads.

The bottom line: Be indispensable, not invisible

The IT teams that survive and thrive will be the ones that make themselves indispensable — not through control, but through enablement. The ones that resist? They’ll be remembered as the last generation of IT dinosaurs, buried under layers of obsolete governance and budget cuts.

It’s 2025. The old enterprise IT model is gone. The question isn’t whether it’s dead—the question is whether you’re ready for what comes next.