How 1 in 10 Companies Turned IT Into Their Biggest Competitive Advantage.
"We're investing heavily in technology. But our business can't see the time-to-value.” said a CIO at an insurance company.
The CIO is describing a problem most IT leaders recognize, but haven't found the right solution for.
The root cause is organizational. Traditional IT is built around outputs like projects delivered, initiatives completed, budgets spent. The frontier businesses measure outcomes like revenue generated, costs reduced, and risk managed. Those two things aren’t the same. And when they’re misaligned, investment disappears into the organization without a trace.
The fix is a ‘value-enablement stream model’. Instead of organizing IT around functions and projects, you organize it around the ‘end-to-end flow of value to the customer’ across each business journey. Every stream is owned by a business leader. Every IT team embedded in that stream reports to that owner and is accountable for outcomes, not deliverables.
The result is a shift from IT as a service provider to IT as a business performance engine. Decisions get made at the value enablement stream level. Priorities are set by the business. Accountability is shared.
McKinsey's Global Tech Agenda 2026 found that only 1 in 10 top-performing companies have fully adopted this model. These frontier companies are doing 4X the rate of everyone else. The gap isn’t technology. It is how IT is organized.
We work with CIOs to put in place a strong governance program to guide product teams, the business units, and the IT department in how to successfully work under a ‘value-enablement stream model’.
Is your IT organization structured around what it builds or what the business needs to win?