Establish an Integrated IT-Business Operating Model

Technology is now a driving force at the core of modern organizations. As emerging technologies expand exponentially, the need for technical capabilities requires a seismic shift that takes technology ownership from IT and puts it into the hands of the organization. Use this research to guide the ownership of curated technologies to leaders across your organization and expand your capacity for innovation, growth, and collaboration.

Emerging technologies have fundamentally transformed how organizations operate, making technology essential not just for IT, but for every function of the modern organization. CIOs and IT leaders must shift from gatekeepers of technology to enablers of a business-led approach, embracing a distributed ownership model that brings shadow IT into the light and enables risk-appropriate adoption of technology by leaders across departments.

1. Understand the internal appetite before you place an order.

Assuming individual leaders or your entire organization are ready to adopt an embedded technology model is the surest way to fail before you’ve begun. Embedding technology ownership across your organization requires widespread support and ongoing buy-in from leaders. Assess everyone’s readiness for a new way of operating and leverage these findings to guide your approach.

2. Build trust with your organizational leaders.

As ownership of select technologies is distributed to organizational leaders, the relationships that IT builds with these leaders become as important as technical knowledge. Leaders who suddenly own technologies without a complete understanding of internal limits or a clear line of communication with IT are less likely to successfully embrace ownership.

3. Align your initiatives with the needs of your customers.

There are infinite ways to begin embedding technology in your organization, making it difficult to prioritize where to start. Leverage your reference architecture to understand when and where customers obtain the greatest value from your organization and use this to find the most impactful opportunities to embed technology.

Use our comprehensive blueprint to design and build an embedded IT operating model for your organization.

Our research can guide the creation of a modern IT operating model suited to the needs of your organization and the demands of your customers or constituents. Remove the barriers that have historically siloed technology from the organization and distribute ownership using this in-depth blueprint with a robust set of tools and templates to:

Assess the readiness of your organization to become more technology enabled with an Exponential IT Operating Model.
Align your approach to how customers or constituents receive value from your organization.
Identify opportunities to realistically embed and empower enterprise leaders to own IT capabilities.
Communicate your plan clearly to enterprise executives to gain buy-in.

Establish an Integrated IT-Business Operating Model Research & Tools

1. Establish an Integrated IT-Business Operating Model Storyboard – A comprehensive guide to embedding technology capabilities across the enterprise to engage and enable your organization.

Use this blueprint to:

Assess readiness for embedding technology capabilities.
Identify enterprise opportunities to embed technology delivery.
Articulate where technology capabilities are embedded.
Define the engagement model for effective delivery.
Identify next steps and changes.

2. Establish an Integrated IT-Business Operating Model Executive Presentation – A visual and customizable presentation template for executives and senior leadership.

Use this presentation template to communicate to organizational leadership:

Why and how the organization will become more tech enabled.
Your reimagined vision, operating model, and organizational structure.
A summary of the changes and phases of your IT transformation.

3. Tech-Enabled Organization Playbook – A detailed guide for IT and the organization’s leadership on execution and delivery of the new model.

Use this comprehensive playbook to:

Clearly define the key players involved in an embedded IT operating model.
Document organizational structure and ways of working.
Communicate day-to-day responsibilities toward successful implementation.

4. Embed Technology Organization Readiness Assessment – An Excel-based assessment tool to determine whether your organization is prepared to adopt an embedded technology model.

Use this interactive tool to:

Assess your organization’s readiness to adopt an embedded technology model.
Identify other models that might be appropriate for you.
Gather insights into ways of working, organizational drivers, perception of IT, and other integral categories to generate a readiness score.

5. IT and Digital Capabilities and Definitions – A reference guide to how IT capabilities are defined and align to overarching IT frameworks.

Refer to this guide to better understand the different IT capabilities.
Align capabilities into their functional groups effectively.
Understand how the capabilities align to Info-Tech's IT Management & Governance Framework as well as to larger industry-specific frameworks.

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Establish an Integrated Business Operating Model

Strategically embed technology capabilities to accelerate adaptability and achieve your organizational outcomes.

Introduction: What is Exponential IT?

The technology curve has recently bent exponentially.
Generative AI has been the catalyst for this sudden shift, but there are more and more new technologies emerging (e.g. quantum computing, 5G), putting significant pressure on all organizations.
All IT leaders and organizations are at risk of falling behind if they do not adopt new technologies fast enough.
Exponential IT is a framework defined by Info-Tech Research Group to instruct IT leaders across all IT domains on how to transform their organization and elevate their value creation capabilities, to close the gap between the exponential progression of technological change and the linear progression of IT's ability to successfully manage that change.
This blueprint provides guidance on establishing integrated and dynamic risk management by evolving and autonomizing previously siloed risk capabilities and practices.
CIOs or delegates can use this blueprint to partner with the chief risk officer or delegates in developing a roadmap to evolve the risk management capabilities of the organization.

Lean into the curve

Accelerate value creation by transforming the organization through exponential technologies

Analyst Perspective

Enable your enterprise to deliver exceptional experiences.

For years, CIOs and IT leaders would tell me time and time again that they want to drive innovation, that they want to create exceptional services and experiences, and that they want their staff to explore emerging technologies. Excitedly, we start to explore what that would look like and mean. One of the founding elements is that the senior-most IT leader trust their organizational leaders to own the technology that drives the way they function and operate. And it is usually right at this moment that I lose them. The organizational leaders either aren't comfortable with the idea of relinquishing some of the control associated with technology capabilities or they run from those technology capabilities, throwing their hands up.

But something has changed and shifted. Organizational leaders are comfortable with technology and very aware of its impact on their function, service, or product. And CIOs want to spend their time being strategic for their organization, spending less time in the weeds of technology delivery. This seismic shift is bringing forward the need and desire to have a technology-enabled enterprise; and with that, innovation, customer-focus, and collaboration. We are starting to see a purposeful choice to remove the barriers that have historically siloed technology from the business.

Brittany Lutes, Research Director

Brittany Lutes
Research Director, CIO Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech's Approach

IT and organizational leaders are being forced to respond to changes in their organization, such as:

Your organization is expanding or changing its business model.
Your organization is looking to expand into new markets and acquire more customers or increase constituent adoption.
Your organization's customers and constituents want seamless, autonomous services.
Your organization's enterprise teams are already exploring how they can use technology in their everyday tasks — with or without your knowledge.

However, the successful evolution of these models' integration is often impeded by:

IT and the "business" still being referred to as two separate entities, creating unnecessary silos.
Absence of good architectural standards that prevent technology sprawl.
Enterprise leaders are not aware that engaging in their own IT elements is considered shadow IT.
Usually little to no interaction exists between those in IT and the end customer or constituent.

Our approach is to enable the organization with technology capabilities by:

Identifying the appetite and ability of your organization to become more technology-enabled with an Exponential IT operating model.
Aligning your approach to how customers or constituents receive value from your organization.
Identifying opportunities to realistically embed and empower enterprise leaders to own IT capabilities.
Communicating and gaining the buy-in of enterprise executives.

Info-Tech Insight

Enabling adaptability, being scalable, and prioritizing customer needs in how you operate must be more than empty words and promises. It is about purposely redefining how the enterprise will operate when the entire enterprise is tech-enabled.

Technology is fundamentally changing not just what organizations can offer, but what customer or constituents expect as a service or product

The purpose for organizations, even those in the public sector, is changing. This is requiring a greater understanding and intentional movement into new-for-your-organization business models.
While we are more interconnected, we are also competing against more organizations to be noticed and get an increased market share.
Customers and constituents expect seamless services or products that provide a positive experience.
We have seen a growth in shadow IT by organizations, highlighting that they will pursue technology with or without IT's help or approval.

40% of CEOs indicated that over the past five years their companies have explored being competitive in new sectors.

Source: PwC, 2025

40% of CIOs are responsible for creating new products or services to support revenue generation.

Source: "The State of the CIO," IDG, 2023

This is being driven by external forces beyond the IT department

Driver #1: Emerging Technologies

Generative AI, agentic AI, quantum computing are some of the most influential technologies coming forward in the next three years. It's important for organizations to recognize that these emerging technologies are not just being actively adopted by them, but by their end customers and constituents.

28% of average IT organizations and 50% of transformer organizations anticipate exponential increases in value from fast-paced development technologies in 2025.

Source: Info-Tech's Tech Trends 2025 Report; n=532

Driver #2: Elevated Customer Experiences

Customers have a new set of expectations that include seamless autonomous services and exceptional experiences that are technologically dependent. Organizations need to be removing barriers between what clients want and the technology that enables those experiences.

60% of IT leaders are optimizing in aspects of the customer experience such as customer relationship management and customer service.

Source: Info-Tech's Future of IT Survey, 2024; n=466

Driver #3: Enterprise-Owned Technology Outcomes

Technology is the business. This shift requires technology to be accessible at all areas of the organization, empowering enterprise decision-makers to actively leverage and even shift business models and accommodate technology needs when appropriate.

50% of organizations have seen AI adopted by two business functions in 2024, specifically in the marketing and product and/or service development functions.

Source: McKinsey, 2024

Driver #4: Talent Optimization

IT is not the only place where the skills and abilities to deliver technology exist anymore. Instead, organizations can leverage resources throughout the enterprise to deliver on a variety of technology capabilities.

31% of IT organizations anticipate restructuring activities in 2025 that will require leveraging more business-led or embedded-IT talent.

Source: Info-Tech's IT Talent Trends 2025 Report; n=403

Every organization is watching these drivers shift the technology value trinity

Yet, we are now at a pivotal point where the influence of standards, stakeholders, and skills are shifting how each of these components can deliver their intended value.

Standards: Use standards to enable not just the IT function, but the entire organization. Leveraging usable standards provides those across the organization with the insight and authority to deliver against strategic objectives.

Stakeholders: The stakeholders that IT has historically focused on, internal end users and business function leaders, have evolved into organizational partners and the end customer or constituent. As these groups explore and use technology in new ways, understanding what those ways are will be critical to enabling and empowering those in the organization to think about that final experience.

Skills: The technical skills we need to operate effectively are consistently changing, but more importantly they are moving outside of central IT. How we democratize and leverage those skills will be important to enabling ongoing delivery of value.

Technology value trinity

Some organizations are achieving this more easily than others who get hindered by:

The lack of collaboration and integration between IT and the business, which forces both to act in silos.
The growing talent shortage that IT organizations are facing for critical roles in data, cloud, cybersecurity and enterprise architecture.
Organizational leaders not held accountable for making technology-related decisions that go against enterprise standards and policies.
IT's historic focus on the organizational partners as the customer – and not having a means or want to understand the organization's true customer or constituent.

90% of IT hiring managers report challenges finding the talent they need in today's market. Source: CIO, 2025

"I think we've done the IT industry a disservice by constantly referring to IT and the business, artificially creating this wedge."

– David Vidoni, VP of IT at Pegasystems, CIO, 2023

Successful organizations recognize that evolving means focusing on an integrated to embedded operating model

Operating model

Fundamentally, how we are organized needs to move away from centralized and integrated models, where control and decision-making is kept 100% or close to 100% within the focus of a main IT function. Instead, look for ways to not only integrate IT with the organization, but to embed it. This allows for certain teams to be organizationally focused (enterprise risk and governance, anyone?), developing and managing the delivery of essential IT services, and for organization-based teams to be technology literate and capable themselves. We want all three elements of centralization in our future state models to give increased oversight on technology's growing importance in driving outcomes across the organization to internal and external stakeholders alike.

Establish an integrated Business operating model

Architect how you will deliver against strategic objectives of the organization

A capability is more than just a person's skills. A capability requires the entire system to satisfy a specific need. This includes people and skills, technology, processes, and measures.

The Elements of an Operating Model:

Elements of an operating model

An IT operating model is a visual representation of the way your IT organization will function using a clear and coherent blueprint. This visualization demonstrates how capabilities are organized and aligned to deliver on the business mission and strategic and technological objectives.

Visualization is the optimization and alignment of the IT organization to deliver the capabilities required to achieve business goals. Additionally, it should demonstrate the workflow so key stakeholders can understand where inputs flow in and outputs flow out of the IT organization. Investing time in the front-end to get the operating model right is critical. This will give you a framework to rationalize future organizational changes, allowing you to be more iterative and your model to change as the business changes.

Using a value stream approach creates greater opportunities for organizational integration

Value streams

Value streams connect business goals to the organization's value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value in the marketplace by engaging in a set of interconnected activities. Those activities are dependent on the specific industry segment an organization operates within. Value streams can extend beyond the organization into the supporting ecosystem, whereas business processes are contained within, ensuring the organization has complete control over them.

It is in these core business processes that you need to identify how and where IT capabilities could be embedded to help drive value realization.
Moreover, we are going to see how these activities grow more interconnected with technology in the coming years as organizations' value streams are forced to reimagine a new experience for customers, partners, or constituents alike.

Purposeful embedding of technology capabilities is not shadow IT

In 2024, we saw a stark 11% growth in the number of organizational stakeholders who indicated that they were engaging in shadow IT without the involvement of IT (Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision). Shadow IT is unsanctioned IT activity that can open the organization up to unexpected risks. It is often discovered by the IT team when they are following up on help desk tickets for unauthorized products or renewal requests from business users or vendors. This is unsanctioned IT activity in the organization that can open the organization up to unwanted risks.

However, when we embed IT, we are purposefully selecting which IT capabilities can and should be owned by the different organizational functions.

Graph plotting extent of shadow IT vs year

Source: Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Survey, 2019-2024; N=1,971

Info-Tech's methodology for embedding technology delivery for organization success

	1. Assess readiness for embedding technology capabilities	2. Identify enterprise opportunities to embed technology delivery	3. Articulate where technology capabilities are embedded	4. Define the engagement model for effective delivery	5. Identify next steps and changes
Step Activities	Assess organizational readiness for embedding technology delivery Review your readiness assessment results	Build your reference architecture Prioritize your Level 1 business capabilities Assess business capabilities Determine which technology capabilities to embed	Review the defining functions Customize the flexible functions that will be embedded Establish your owned customized functions Bring the functions together	Define functional inputs and outputs Identify the functional interactions Visualize the functional interactions Complete the high-level visualization	Identify the potential changes required Build an action plan to implement the changes Communicate the changes and secure executive buy-in
Step Outcomes	Assess technology's role in driving organizational outcomes and determine if an embedded technology model is the right fit for your organization to pursue.	Define when and where technology capabilities should be embedded at the enterprise level to enable increased value delivery.	To visually depict where IT capabilities will be rooted throughout the organization to enable enhanced delivery and experiences.	Refine the visualized operating model and clarify how each function will interact with other functions and the necessary inputs and outputs to make them successful.	A clear and transparent method of communicating the changes to executive leadership and action plans to achieve.

Insight summary

Establish a way to drive the innovation culture.

The daily interactions and ways of operating in an organization will reinforce the innovative and forward-looking culture more than any vision or mission statement an organization defines.

Assess everyone's readiness for a new way of operating.

Assuming readiness to adopt an integrated model to enable technology delivery will be the surest way to fail. Get organization-wide leadership to confirm the whole organization, including IT, can make the shift.

Actively determine how the organization will manage technology delivery.

Embedding technology capabilities into the organization must be purposeful. Both the IT leader and organization leader need to understand the shift in accountabilities that will come by undergoing this type of shift.

Set organizational leaders up for success.

Organizational leaders who suddenly "own" technology capabilities might be unsure of when and where they will still need to integrate with the central IT organization.

Align to customer value chains.

Leveraging your reference architecture provides insight into when and where customers obtain the greatest value from your organization – highlighting the greatest opportunities to embed technology.

Phased changes will ensure success.

When making the shift, establish a six to twelve month change plan which will allow people to get comfortable with their new ways of working.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Tech-Enabled Organization Playbook

Provide IT and organization leadership with next steps and how to successfully function in the new model.

Tech-Enabled Organization screenshots

Tech-Enabled Organization Readiness Assessment

Determine the organization's readiness to adopt an embedded technology model and constraints.

Tech-Organization Readiness Assessment screenshots

Key deliverable:

Executive Presentation

Communicate to organizational leadership with ease why and how the organization will become more tech enabled.

Executive presentation screenshots

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits	Organization Benefits
Insight into when and where the organization is owning its technology delivery. Ability to understand end-customer or constituent needs more effectively. Break the barriers that often separate the business and IT from one another, creating unified strategic objectives and outcomes. Limit the increased spending on IT resources and continuous requests for new resources.	Ability to adapt and mold the business model to modern needs and remain consistently relevant. Greater end-customer or constituent satisfaction, leading to increased service usage and market share. Increase the technical skill set of employees across the organization, enabling greater cross-role delivery options.

The value of enabling technology delivery throughout the organization

Spend less money and time, while getting exceptional results the Info-Tech Research Group way:

Reduced time: 6+ months > 3 months or less
Reduced cost: $200K consulting engagement > included in membership
Increased value: Neutral satisfaction > exceptional satisfaction

Value Outcomes	Measurement
Increase technology skill adoption	Level of technology skill competency within organization
Increase end-customer or constituent satisfaction	End-customer or constituent satisfaction
Establish a good service or product portfolio mix	Service or product usage
Reduce time to respond to organizational needs	Response time to address needs
Enable the organization to say "yes" to more worthwhile technology-driven initiatives

Establish an Integrated IT-Business Operating Model visualization

Strategically embed technology capabilities across the enterprise to engage and enable the organization.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

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