Change is constant. No news there. But the ever-quickening pace of change? That continues to worry folks, including executives.

Some 82% of C-suite leaders expect a higher level of change this year than last, according to the Pulse of Change report from professional services firm Accenture. But only 55% of those execs feel prepared for the technological disruption coming in 2026.

To succeed today, organizations can’t just transform. They must do so fast, and they must do so continuously, says Ram Palaniappan, CTO of TEKsystems Global Services.

Those that do both pull ahead: TEKsystems’ research shows that 82% of leading organizations consider digital transformation as a core pillar of business strategy, versus 34% of laggards.

Here, veteran IT executives and advisors offer 10 strategies CIOs can employ to increase their organizational velocity on transformational initiatives.

1. Establish an ‘innovation engine’

“Incremental improvement and transformation differ,” says Manish Jain, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Transformation can’t happen without innovation, because transformation is something new.”

Given that innovation is key to transformation, organizations need a way to capture, test, and prioritize new ideas as they arise, from wherever they arise.

“You need a way to capture those and convert them into commercially viable products and services, and to do that you need an engine to turn them into something,” Jain explains. “But many organizations don’t have an innovation engine at all; they don’t know how to grab those sparks. And other times they become too bureaucratic. It must be agile, with funding aligned to outcomes and integrated with the delivery team.”

2. Tackle fewer initiatives at once

Many projects get labeled as “transformation,” but both IT and business teams can sometimes view their initiatives as more innovative than they are. That leads to a long list of work to be done.

That’s not good for velocity, because when organizations tackle too many initiatives at once, they diffuse resources. Teams get pulled in different directions, which typically leads to longer delivery times and delays, says Jeff Sturman, managing partner for the Information Technology and Digital Leadership Practice at WittKieffer, a leadership advisory and search firm.

According to the 2026 State of Strategic Portfolio Management Report from software maker Tempo, capacity planning and resource allocation are the No. 1 and No. 3 struggles organizations face in project execution.

CIOs could move more quickly by limiting the number of initiatives happening at a given time, so they can concentrate resources on high-priority endeavors, and help ensure staff and services are available when needed, says Sturman, a former chief digital information officer.

“Speed increases when focus increases,” he says. “So let’s not try to do a thousand projects. Let’s cap the enterprise initiatives at a certain number, maybe three to five, so you’re more successful at getting those done fast.”

It may require CIOs to shift from annual to quarter-by-quarter planning, Sturman says, but they will find the shift pays off by speeding the time to value that their IT work delivers to the organization.

3. Prioritize better

Concentrating resources on fewer initiatives increases speed. But if the objective is to speed up transformation and not just delivery of IT work in general, CIOs must be perfect at prioritizing.

“Let’s do the projects that are going to affect sales and growth, productivity, take costs out, and improve quality. All the other stuff might be noise,” Sturman says.

That’s often hard to do, particularly today, seasoned IT leaders say. Tempo’s State of SPM Report confirms as much, with surveyed planning and PMO leaders listing prioritization as the second-biggest struggle in project execution today.

“AI has created frenetic activity, where doing nothing is seen as really bad so doing something is perceived as better than doing nothing,” Dom Profico, who as CTO of consultancy Bridgenext advises CIOs.

“But it’s better to take a breath and understand how you’ll create returns from each transformation so you can prioritize those and, ultimately, accelerate the delivery of those outcomes.”

4. Be clear on desired outcomes

Transformation initiatives get slowed down when additional requests get tacked on, as scope creep remains an issue even as organizations mature their project management disciplines.

Those requests become extra baggage that weighs down workers as they’re trying to sprint, ensuring they can’t move at top speed, Info-Tech’s Jain says.

To counteract the temptation to tack on extras, Jain advises CIOs and business sponsors to identify the outcomes sought by the transformation — whether it’s capturing new customers, boosting productivity, enhancing user experiences, or improving resiliency.

“Workers need a clear vision of what they’re going to prioritize,” he says, noting that teams who are clear on outcomes can move more efficiently toward the finish line and can make faster trade-offs if they arise.

WittKieffer’s Sturman agrees, saying that when he worked as a CIO he ensured initiatives had clearly stated goals. Those enabled him to deflect requests that threatened to expand the scope of work and, thus, slow down delivery times.

“I think CIOs go faster when they can say, ‘Let’s focus on outcomes,’” he adds. “So identify tangible, tactical outcomes to achieve. And make sure it’s not just an IT outcome but a business outcome. Making it a shared objective helps it stay focused so things can get done much more quickly.”

5. Turn executives into active participants

To gain speed and ensure success, top-level leadership needs to be actively involved in transformation work, says Mohamad Ali, senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting.

Ali knows that from experience.

IBM has used generative AI to transform many of its workflows, including 70 that once represented $25 billion in spend that today runs at $20.4 billion.

Ali credits the cultivation of empowered, engaged leadership as a key factor for delivering transformation and doing so at top speed.

The company created four teams tasked with driving transformation from the top, including a steering committee chaired by the CEO that meets every week and has a “complete and utter dedication to getting [transformation ] done,” he says. The other teams focus on project implementation, measuring impact, and engaging the workforce.

“These teams are working to drive change with a fair amount of speed,” Ali says.

CIOs tasked with implementing the technology for transformation initiatives cannot assume that they have such dedicated leadership to back that work, Ali says.

“It’s not there automatically in all companies,” he says, even though it’s critical for accelerating buy-in and adoption throughout the organization. “You have to have the executive sponsorship and focus when what you’re doing is fundamentally redesigning your business, because that doesn’t happen easily.”

6. Enlist more of the workforce in transformation

“If you have 10 people working on something, you can only go so fast, but if you had 100,000, you can go faster,” Ali says.

For IBM this meant multiday hackathons involving 100,000 or more staffers, who as part of the events learned to build AI agents and were then tasked with building them to transform their workflows.

Empowering all those employees with that mandate got transformative agents built in short order, Ali says.

It also spurred quicker adoption, he adds. “If I build an agent, there’s a chance it won’t do what you want it to do or that you view it as something just foisted on you. But if you build it yourself, there will be more buy-in and adoption overall will be much faster.”

Profico offers a similar strategy for speed: Decentralize decision-making by giving teams the ability to make their own decisions within clearly defined guidelines so they can take action immediately rather than halt action to run questions up the chain of command and wait for a response.

7. Create channels to share innovations

Another move that Ali credits with speeding transformation within IBM is the creation of a catalog to share agents built by employees.

As of early 2026, the catalog had 3,000 digital workers (aka agents or assistants). Ali says staffers have created tens of thousands of agents, but the company has an AI-supported process for picking those that would be most useful to other workers and making them available for adoption.

The catalog “assembles them all together so [employees] can consume them efficiently,” Ali explains, noting that IBM also evolved its IT infrastructure to ensure employees could take and use the catalogued agents effectively and securely.

The idea, Ali stresses, is to reduce the need to replicate work — which not only wastes hours but slows down enterprise progress.

8. Reduce complexity and silos

According to the State of Digital Transformation 2026 report from TEKsystems, 38% of technology and business decision-makers surveyed said the complexity of their current environment, and its accompanying siloed mindset and behaviors, was a top barrier to transformation, topping the survey’s list of such challenges.

Those two things — complexity and siloes — slow transformation, TEKsystems’ Palaniappan says.

“The current functional structure within some organizations is set up for the large-scale transformation of the past, but you need a leaner, much more cohesive organization for the newer AI-driven transformation,” he explains.

Consider, for example, an organization where the sales department wants to use agentic AI to transform its lead-to-sales process. The sales department has its own data, systems, and workforce ready to work with agents. However, the initiative requires access to systems and data walled off in other parts of the organization. Chiseling away at those barriers, particularly if that work is done ad hoc to meet the needs of each separate project, puts a drag on the pace of transformation.

Palaniappan says CIOs would do well to reduce IT complexity and silos to support transformation in general as well as to boost the speed at which it happens. “Break down the walls between the different functions and make it more end to end, because transformation now is end to end,” he adds.

9. Anticipate user needs and new capabilities

Keeping pace is not enough, says Dan Inbar, senior vice president and CIO at Symbotic, which provides warehouse automation technology.

“As an IT organization, service provider, and transformation leader, we have a responsibility to stay not just current but ahead of both our user community and the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change,” Inbar says.

That means being “proactive in anticipating user needs and enabling new capabilities.” Put another way, Inbar says that “transformation must be intentionally, proactively, and thoughtfully led by IT — not by reacting to pressure, but by anticipating it.”

To do this, he says CIOs must become fully integrated, strategic partners.

“This requires aligning technical roadmaps directly with each business unit’s objectives so that high‑impact initiatives receive executive prioritization,” Inbar explains. “When IT and the business co‑develop goals, technology investments become purpose‑driven and tied to measurable outcomes rather than technical curiosity. This shift reinforces IT’s position as a primary engine of business growth.”

To do so, Inbar advises CIOs to begin by translating the business strategy into the technology capabilities required to achieve its goals.

“I’ve partnered closely with our business units to understand their target states and co‑develop the path to get there,” he adds. “IT isn’t just about technology; it’s about deeply understanding enterprise processes, and documenting and optimizing them — and only then automating them, once they’re truly ready.”

10. Develop an empowered cross-functional governance entity

Atilla Tinic, senior vice president and CIO of Qualcomm, points out that AI transformation differs from earlier digital efforts in significant ways.

“While digital transformation focused on automating processes, AI transformation focuses on intelligence and reasoning. As a result, AI should be more about decision-making, which means we all need to re-examine our workflows, interfaces, cloud workloads, data, and application strategies,” he says.

To bring needed speed to that task, organizations need ready-made oversight capable of quickly making decisions to move initiatives forward.

Tinic says Qualcomm established a cross‑functional governance entity to do just that.

“Bringing together leaders from IT, security, legal, HR, and the business helps organizations address data, privacy, and risk considerations upfront rather than slowing projects later,” he explains. “This kind of structure focuses teams on the highest‑value use cases, reduces duplication, and shortens the path from concept to secure deployment.”

Such cross-functional governance enables agility and speed by removing uncertainty, rework, and downstream risk, he says.

“Teams spend less time navigating approvals, re‑architecting solutions, or managing unexpected risk after deployment, which makes it easier to scale AI with confidence,” he explains.

https://www.cio.com/article/4154263/10-ways-to-accelerate-digital-transformation-2.html