---
title: Why new CIOs end up as order takers, and how to stop
description: "IT and business alignment: about 70% of transformations fall short (BCG, 2026). How a new CIO turns competing requests into shared priorities."
image: https://www.strollingdigital.com/hubfs/new-it-leader-business-priorities-alignment-preview.png
---

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Digital Transformation

# IT and business alignment: why new CIOs inherit a backlog, not a plan

![Strolling Digital](https://www.strollingdigital.com/hs-fs/hubfs/strolling-digital-logo-autor.jpg?width=48&height=48&name=strolling-digital-logo-autor.jpg)

 Strolling Digital

October 20, 2026

Most new IT leaders inherit competing requests, not a strategy, and about 70% of transformations fall short of their objectives (BCG, 2026).

For a new CIO in an equipment rental or construction company, IT and business alignment in the first quarter is not a technology question. It is a negotiation.

 

*Reading time: 9 minutes | Keywords: IT and business alignment, silo management in transformation, technology prioritization, IT governance, new CIO*

| Key Takeaways |
| --- |
| > **About 70% of transformations fall short of their objectives (BCG, 2026). Too many priorities, not too few tools, is one of the main reasons.** - Companies can often capture 80% of a transformation's value by focusing on roughly 20% of initiatives (BCG, 2026), which makes prioritization the first job of a new IT leader. - Organizations that communicate a clear and compelling vision are over four times more likely to be healthy (McKinsey, 2025), so shared criteria matter more than any single roadmap. - Even high-performing companies have a 30% gap between their strategy's full potential and the results they deliver (McKinsey, 2025), and much of that gap lives between departments. - 89% of organizations still mainly use a traditional hierarchical structure (McKinsey, 2025), which is why cross-area decisions default to escalation instead of a shared forum. - Team-focused transformations can lead to 30% efficiency gains (McKinsey, 2024), and the first wins of a new CIO should require at least two areas to cooperate. |

Operations wants real-time fleet visibility. Finance wants faster invoicing and a cleaner month-end close. Sales wants a CRM that finally shows what is available to rent. Each area arrives with a list, a deadline and a sponsor, and none of the lists agree.

The temptation is to pick a side: impose a technology roadmap from the top, or accept every request and try to deliver them all. Both paths end in the same place. The first creates resistance. The second creates a backlog that grows faster than the team. In both cases, the fragmentation that existed before the new leader arrived stays exactly where it was, and the cost is not small: about 70% of transformations fall short of their objectives (BCG, 2026).

Alignment is not a soft topic either. As Jonathan Trevor puts it in Harvard Business Review (2026), all other things being equal, the best-aligned enterprises tend to be the best performing.

This article looks at what the first months should look like for a CIO, CTO or IT Director who joins an organization where every area already has its own priorities. Early success depends less on new tools and more on three things: auditing how well areas talk to each other, defusing the turf wars, and building one prioritization framework anchored in company goals.

## Reading the current state of IT and business alignment before proposing anything

Most new leaders run a technology audit in their first 90 days: systems inventory, licences, contracts, technical debt. It is useful and incomplete. What decides whether IT can deliver value is rarely the state of the systems. It is the state of the conversations between the areas that use them.

### Audit the dialogue, not just the systems

In rental and construction companies, the same asset often exists in three versions: the one physically in the yard, the one in the ERP, and the one in the project manager's spreadsheet. Each version has an owner, and each owner has good reasons to trust their own. When a new IT leader asks "what is the priority?", the real question is which version wins.

A dialogue maturity audit asks different questions. Do operations, finance and sales share a definition of availability, utilization or margin? Who decides when two requests compete for the same budget? Is there a forum where those decisions are made, or are they settled by whoever escalates first?

The answers matter beyond IT. Organizations that communicate a clear and compelling vision for the future are over four times more likely to be healthy than those that do not (McKinsey, 2025). A shared definition of the numbers that run the business is where that vision becomes operational.

### Map the dependencies nobody wrote down

Every request that reaches IT carries dependencies that are not in the ticket. A new dispatch app depends on master data that finance controls. A billing automation depends on how site managers close delivery notes. These are the dependencies that break projects in month four.

Mapping them early does two things. It shows which requests are actually the same problem described by different areas, and it makes visible who has to agree before anything moves.

> "The machine is in the yard. The system says it is on contract. That gap is not an IT ticket. It is a disagreement between two departments that nobody has been asked to settle."

## From order taker to facilitator: building an objective framework for technology prioritization

An IT function that works as an order taker measures itself by how many requests it closes. That model looks responsive, and it quietly rewards the area that pushes hardest. It also spreads capacity thin. BCG describes a major retailer where poor prioritization meant more than 100 initiatives were underway at the same time, most of them too small to make a meaningful difference (BCG, 2023).

The alternative is not to say no more often. It is to change what IT and business alignment rests on: a shared set of criteria that every request is measured against, agreed before any request is ranked.

### Criteria tied to company goals, not area goals

- **Impact on a company-level objective:** revenue per asset, fleet utilization, days sales outstanding, project margin.
- **Cross-area reach:** how many areas the initiative unblocks or affects.
- **Data foundation:** whether it improves or degrades the quality of data that several areas depend on.
- **Effort and risk:** cost, internal capacity, and what has to stop if this starts.
- **Time to visible result:** whether the business can see something within one quarter.

Criteria only work if the leadership team signs off on them before seeing the ranked list. Otherwise every area will argue the weights after the fact.

The payoff of getting this right is concentration. Companies can often achieve 80% of a transformation's value by focusing on roughly 20% of initiatives (BCG, 2026). A shared framework is what lets a leadership team agree on which 20%.

### IT as arbiter, not judge

The goal is not for IT to decide what the business needs. It is for IT to make the trade-offs explicit so the business decides with the same information. When a COO and a CFO see that their two requests depend on the same data cleanup, the conversation shifts from "mine first" to "what do we fix first so both work".

> "An IT team that says yes to everyone becomes the place where company disagreements go to wait."

## What leaders get wrong about IT and business alignment

Alignment is often treated as an event: an offsite, a strategy deck, a roadmap signed in the first 100 days. The numbers suggest it is a permanent gap to manage. Even high-performing companies have a 30% gap between their strategy's full potential and the results they deliver (McKinsey, 2025).

Three mistakes show up repeatedly with new technology leaders:

- **Confusing agreement with alignment:** a leadership team can approve a roadmap and still assign its people to something else. Alignment shows in resource decisions, not in meeting minutes.
- **Treating priorities as fixed:** rental demand moves with the construction cycle, and a priority set in January can be wrong by June. Harvard Business Review (2026) warns that under pressure, decision-making drifts out of sync across a leadership team, which keeps acting on outdated assumptions after priorities have shifted.
- **Starting with the tool:** an ERP or CRM selection gives everyone something concrete to argue about, and delays the conversation that matters, which is what the business needs the data to say.

Each of these mistakes moves the conflict between areas into the IT backlog, where it becomes harder to see and more expensive to solve.

## Governance and early wins: silo management that builds consensus

Governance has a bad reputation because it is usually designed as a control layer. For a new IT leader, it should work the other way: as the mechanism that makes cross-area decisions faster than escalations. That matters because 89% of organizations still mainly use a traditional hierarchical structure (McKinsey, 2025), where a disagreement between two areas travels up before it travels across.

### A light governance model that areas actually use

In a mid-sized company, three elements are usually enough. A monthly prioritization forum with the heads of operations, finance, sales and IT. One shared backlog that everyone can see. A rule that no initiative above an agreed budget threshold starts without a decision from that forum.

The forum works best when it behaves like a team with a shared mission, not a committee that approves budgets. McKinsey research shows that team-focused transformations can lead to 30% efficiency gains (McKinsey, 2024).

### Choose early wins that cross a department boundary

The first wins should be small and visible, but above all they should require two areas to cooperate. A utilization dashboard that operations and finance both trust. A single definition of off-hire date that sales, the yard and billing all use. Wins like these prove the model works across boundaries, which is exactly what every area doubts at the start.

> "Early wins inside one department prove that IT can deliver. Early wins across a department boundary prove that the company can decide together."

## Actionable steps for a new IT leader

1. **Weeks 1 to 3, listen across areas:** interview each area head separately. Ask what they need, and also what they believe other areas need. The gaps between those answers are your first map.
2. **Weeks 3 to 5, audit expectations and dependencies:** consolidate every open request, group the duplicates, and document the dependencies nobody wrote down.
3. **Weeks 5 to 7, propose prioritization criteria:** present the criteria, not the ranked list, to the leadership team and get explicit sign-off.
4. **Weeks 7 to 9, run the first prioritization forum:** rank the consolidated backlog in the room, with every area present.
5. **Weeks 9 to 12, deliver one cross-area win:** report the result in business metrics, not in project milestones.

The new leader who succeeds in year one is rarely the one who launched the most projects. It is the one who gave the company a way to decide.

Is your IT team ranking requests, or helping the business arbitrate its priorities?

If every area arrives with its own list and nobody owns the trade-offs, a diagnostic session with **Strolling Digital** can show where alignment breaks and what to fix first. [Let's talk.](https://www.strollingdigital.com/lets-move-towards-digital?hsLang=en-us)

---

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How does a new CIO align IT with business priorities?

A new CIO aligns IT with business priorities by auditing how areas make decisions before proposing any technology roadmap. That means checking whether operations, finance and sales share definitions of key metrics, consolidating all open requests and mapping hidden dependencies between them. The next step is a set of prioritization criteria tied to company goals, approved by the leadership team before any request is ranked.

### What is the difference between IT as an order taker and IT as a business partner?

An order-taking IT function measures itself by how many requests it closes, which rewards the area that pushes hardest and spreads capacity thin. A partner IT function makes trade-offs between requests explicit so the leadership team decides with the same information. IT does not decide what the business needs. It helps the business arbitrate between competing priorities.

### How do you prioritize IT projects when every department has different priorities?

Prioritize IT projects against shared criteria instead of department requests: impact on a company-level objective, cross-area reach, effect on shared data quality, effort and risk, and time to a visible result. The leadership team should approve those criteria before seeing the ranked list. BCG (2026) notes that companies can often achieve 80% of a transformation's value by focusing on roughly 20% of initiatives.

### What do leaders get wrong about strategic alignment between IT and business?

Leaders often confuse agreement with alignment, treat priorities as fixed, and start with a tool selection instead of the business conversation. A leadership team can approve a roadmap and still assign its people elsewhere, so alignment shows in resource decisions, not in meeting minutes. Each of these mistakes pushes conflict between departments into the IT backlog, where it becomes harder to see and more expensive to solve.

### How do you break down silos during a digital transformation?

Silos break down when cross-area decisions have a faster path than escalation. A light governance model works in most mid-sized companies: a monthly prioritization forum with the heads of operations, finance, sales and IT, one shared backlog, and a budget threshold above which no initiative starts without the forum's decision. The first wins should require at least two departments to cooperate, such as a utilization dashboard that operations and finance both trust.

### What should a new IT leader do in the first 90 days?

In the first 90 days, a new IT leader should listen to each area head separately, then consolidate requests and map their dependencies. Around weeks 5 to 7, the leader proposes prioritization criteria and gets leadership sign-off, then runs the first prioritization forum. By weeks 9 to 12, the goal is one cross-area win reported in business metrics.

---

## Sources & References

- **BCG**. *[The power of priorities: why less is more in a transformation](https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/the-power-of-priorities-in-a-transformation)*, 2026. Supports the 70% transformation shortfall and the 80/20 concentration of value.
- **BCG**. *[Are you prioritizing your priorities?](https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/why-the-prioritization-stage-is-key-to-success)*, 2023. Supports the retailer example with more than 100 initiatives underway.
- **McKinsey & Company**. *[Alignment advantage: healthy organizations navigate a path to success](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/alignment-advantage-healthy-organizations-navigate-a-path-to-success)*, 2025. Supports the finding that organizations with a clear vision are over four times more likely to be healthy.
- **McKinsey & Company**. *[A new operating model for a new world](https://www.mckinsey.de/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/a-new-operating-model-for-a-new-world)*, 2025. Supports the 30% strategy-to-results gap and the 89% share of hierarchical structures.
- **McKinsey & Company**. *[All about teams: a new approach to organizational transformation](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/all-about-teams-a-new-approach-to-organizational-transformation)*, 2024. Supports the 30% efficiency gains from team-focused transformations.
- **Harvard Business Review**. *[What leaders get wrong about strategic alignment](https://hbr.org/2026/01/what-leaders-get-wrong-about-strategic-alignment)*, Jonathan Trevor, 2026. Supports the link between alignment and performance.
- **Harvard Business Review**. *[Align your leadership team when priorities shift](https://hbr.org/tip/2026/03/align-your-leadership-team-when-priorities-shift)*, 2026. Supports the point on decision-making drifting out of sync when priorities change.

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