cio_es45d ago
Modernization remains a priority for CIOs, with IT executives saying that legacy systems and outdated infrastructure stymie AI adoption, innovation, and ultimately business growth.Indeed, CIOs cite modernization as a key component of their transformation work, which dominates the agenda of most IT leaders — some 77%, according to CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO report.But the priority today is not just modernization, but modernization at top speed.“Technology is moving fast, but society and business conditions are moving faster, so now you have to modernize just to keep up,” says veteran IT leader Janet Sherlock, founder and CEO of Org.Works, an advisory firm on organization structure and strategy. “Modernization has to happen at a faster clip all the time, so your whole organization can move faster.”Most CIOs say they’re up for the challenge: Roughly three-quarters believe they’ll complete a wide range of legacy modernization initiatives within two years, according to research from Cognizant, an IT services and consulting firm.Researchers, however, aren’t as optimistic, noting that organizations face a host of challenges — from skills shortages to budget constraints — as they move to more rapidly modernize.Despite such challenges, IT advisors and long-serving IT leaders say there are efforts CIOs can undertake to accelerate IT modernization. Here are six strategies they say can help speed the process.1. Use AI as a bridge to the futureMany — if not most — organizations want to speed up their modernization efforts to quickly capitalize on AI, but they should also be using AI to accelerate that modernization work, says Erik Brown, a senior partner at consulting firm West Monroe and leader of its Technology and Experience Practice.As Brown notes, teams typically have had to manually review documentation and code and work to decompose legacy monoliths before implementing more modern infrastructure and systems. Now, however, they can use AI “to help move the current state into the future.”“AI can analyze millions of lines of code. It can understand stored procedures and ETL scripts and create modern versions to move data into a modern platform. It’s turning months of laborious manual work into days. That’s a massive lift,” he says. “And it builds institutional knowledge to build speed. That’s a massive accelerator.”West Monroe says there’s a financial incentive to moving faster, as its research shows that most leaders believe their organizations lose 1% to 5% of annual revenue due to slow decisions and actions. West Monroe calls it the “slowness tax.”Furthermore, Brown believes AI will play an increasingly more significant role in IT modernization in the years to come. He predicts that AI agents will someday be capable of constantly reviewing the IT environment, including resources within applications, for pieces that are out of date; once agents identify the outdated pieces, they will determine how best to update them and then execute the updates — with limited to no human intervention, only human oversight.“AI gives us an amazing mechanism to handle continuous modernization,” Brown says, acknowledging agentic AI is not yet capable of doing that yet but is “confident it will be.”In today’s incarnation, while agentic AI shows promise, applying it to legacy systems still presents challenges.2. Adopt managed services and serverless architecturesPaul Sullivan, vice president of cloud governance at Capital One, says the company views “modernization as the continuous refinement of our operational DNA, enabling a permanent state of evolution.”The goal, he explains, “is a frictionless environment where we can rapidly deliver new capabilities, including AI-driven ones, without being slowed down by the weight of how we used to build software and deliver value.”Case in point is its recent enterprise-wide shift to a serverless approach for application development, which made managed, cloud-native compute as the default for new applications. Sullivan says the change “allowed us to treat infrastructure as a set of services rather than something developers directly operate. We moved away from manual management and toward a model where the platform handles the undifferentiated heavy lifting.”The shift enabled faster innovation, a stronger security posture, and better cost efficiency, he says.Given such benefits, Sullivan lists the adoption of managed services and serverless architectures as a key strategy for accelerating modernization.“CIOs should stop viewing infrastructure as a set of assets to manage and start viewing it as a product delivered through services,” he says. “When you pair this with automated governance and observability, you create a safe space for innovation. It allows teams to move fast without the risk of compromising security or resilience.”“Teams spend less time on maintenance and more time on the creative part of engineering,” Sullivan adds. “We want them to be able to focus on writing exceptional code and building innovative applications. This reduction in toil translates directly into faster delivery. It creates a culture where experimentation is cheap and quick. When the platform handles the plumbing, the engineers can focus on the product.”3. Establish a culture of modernizationLauren Wilkinson, divisional CIO of Financial Advisor Services at Vanguard, says her company has modernized its systems “to the cloud using microservices architecture that enables speed and resilience.”She adds, “The results have been promising, including upgrading our website experience and launching a new mobile app, and moving to daily continuous delivery of enhancements, meaning our teams can respond faster to client feedback.”Wilkinson says the ability to tackle such modernization initiatives with speed requires alignment with the organization’s goals.“The most important strategy is to establish a north star at the top of the organization,” she explains. “Modernization cannot simply be deemed a tech initiative; it must be a business initiative. An enterprise-wide north star will determine your course and potentially alleviate competing priorities between technology and business functions, a common roadblock.”4. Introduce AI to re-engineer processesWilkinson says a more recent modernization effort was the introduction of vibe coding for its development teams.“By integrating advanced tools, we eliminated traditional handoffs between engineering, product, and design teams, accelerating our webpage design process by 40% and reducing prototyping time from two weeks to just 20 minutes,” she adds. “It has not just transformed our engineering process; it’s reshaped how we deliver value to our clients.”5. Get clarity on roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authorityCompanies that don’t have clarity on who makes what decisions on technology and processes can’t move as fast on modernization efforts. That’s because teams must spend valuable time determining who owns what platforms, systems, and capabilities that their modernization initiatives will impact, says Sherlock.“Ambiguity,” she adds, “is a tax on performance.”She says her research found that speed is negatively impacted by about 25% in organizations with CIOs and chief AI officers who are peers because of such ambiguity.“If decision-making responsibilities are not clear, and multiple teams or multiple people believe they’re responsible for [something], decisions are held up. IT has to circle around and spend time trying to figure out who is really responsible,” she explains. “And then you get into a turf situation, then you get friction, which holds up communication and that holds up speed, and that slows the entire ship.”Sherlock says she has encountered ambiguity in her past executive roles, which include chief digital and technical officer at Ralph Lauren from 2022 to 2024 and its CIO from 2017 to 2022.“If I ever felt like someone on another team stepped over something on my team, I set up a meeting and said, ‘We should do this, and you should do that. It’s not about turf. It’s about clarity, so that we can move faster together.’”6. Get modular with your IT architectureIT needs to move like racecar pit crews, who can rapidly change worn-out components, says Danielle Phaneuf, a partner with PwC Technology Strategy and leader of the firms’ CIO Program.To do that, CIOs need to go with modular IT architecture so “everything can be changed out,” she says.Modular IT architecture features independent, interoperable components that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. Because each module has clear interfaces and responsibilities, IT teams can update or replace capabilities without disrupting the entire stack — just as pit crews do when they replace parts but not the racecar itself.“You want modularity. You don’t want that monolithic model to creep back in. But you also don’t want modularity from the standpoint of fragmentation. The whole key is to create the fewest dependencies, so you can literally unplug something when you want to plug the new thing in,” Phaneuf explains.This approach is particularly useful when it comes to AI models, Phaneuf says. Ongoing innovations are happening so fast that today’s leading AI model could become tomorrow’s laggard, so organizations need the ability to quickly switch out one model for another when needed.
