The IT function has never been more strategic or more essential. In 2025, 82% of CIOs say their role is becoming more digital and innovation-focused. And 81% agree that the CIO is now a changemaker, leading both business and technology initiatives. As AI, automation, and complex cloud environments reshape operations, CIOs are leading innovation, shaping strategy, and driving business outcomes.
But while IT’s role has evolved, the metrics haven’t. Many teams still solely measure operational KPIs like uptime, ticket volumes, and MTTR. These track activity but fail to show bottom-line impact. If IT wants to be seen as a business enabler rather than a cost center, it’s time to change the scorecard.
Measure what matters
Operational KPIs still have a place. They show how well systems are running. But they don’t reveal how IT is accelerating delivery, improving resilience, or enabling strategic goals.
To demonstrate real impact, IT leaders need to track outcomes, not just outputs. For example:
- Operational agility: Faster employee onboarding and more efficient order management and payment processing, orchestrated through integrated third-party apps.
- AI and automation impact: Increased capacity for strategic work, fewer user-facing incidents, reduced risk through automated controls, and hours saved by eliminating repetitive tasks.
- Digital transformation: Accelerated cloud migration, less vendor lock-in, and faster adaptation to business needs. These all drive speed, flexibility, and cost savings.
- Business growth: Shorter time-to-market for internal tools, faster infrastructure provisioning to support new product launches, and improved uptime that enables more customer transactions.
- ROI on IT initiatives. Lowering operating costs, deferred headcount thanks to automation, and stronger margins from workflow optimization.
As Brad Rumph, Field CTO at Tines, puts it:
“The real measure of success for IT lies in its ROI on initiatives. This means demonstrating tangible results like lowered operating costs, deferred headcount due to automation, and stronger margins achieved through workflow optimization.”
Speak the business’s language
To earn a seat at the strategy table, IT can’t just report technical performance. It needs to communicate business impact.
According to IDC’s 2025 research, many IT teams are stuck measuring infrastructure uptime or cost. But without tying those metrics to business results, that disconnect can stall digital transformation efforts, limit executive buy-in, and obscure the true value of IT.
As Mark Settle, 7x CIO and author of Truth from the Trenches, puts it:
“The principal downside of operational metrics is that they’re typically ignored by executives and functional groups outside IT.”
Executives care about revenue, cost reduction, and risk mitigation. So reframe the metrics:
- Replace “mean time to resolution” with “number of user-impacting incidents per quarter.”
- Swap “system availability” for “downtime during customer hours.”
- Highlight “hours lost to access delays” instead of just “ticket closure time.”
From siloed metrics to shared outcomes
IT doesn’t operate in isolation. It shouldn’t measure success that way. When teams track different metrics, it’s harder to align or prove collective impact.
To fix this, co-define success. Work with security, product, and other stakeholders to agree on shared outcomes, such as:
- Time-to-access: how fast users get tools they need.
- Time-to-value: how quickly a solution delivers results.
- Manual effort reduced: how much routine work is eliminated through automation.
As Brad Rumph says:
“Shared workflows demand shared accountability. If security and IT are both working on access management, they should be measuring the same things.”
You can’t measure what you can’t orchestrate
You can’t prove impact if your workflows are disconnected and chaotic. Orchestration connects systems, tools, and teams so complex processes run smoothly and visibly. It’s the foundation for efficiency, speed, and accountability.
Done right, it eliminates manual muckwork, reduces handoffs, and brings clarity across environments. That visibility makes it easier to track how IT contributes to faster delivery, stronger resilience, and smarter cost control.
For example:
- Automating access requests can reduce time-to-resolution and improve time-to-access.
- Provisioning infrastructure on demand can cut cloud spend and improve utilization.
- Coordinating app deployments across environments can shorten time to market.
- Feeding incident data into an AI model can help detect patterns and trigger remediation workflows automatically.
Set metrics that drive impact
In his Truth from the Trenches book, Mark Settle recommends that good metrics should be:
- Definable: Clearly defined, consistent across teams, and adaptable to context.
- Measurable: Data is easy to collect reliably.
- Comprehensible: Business stakeholders understand what it means.
- Sustainable: Can be tracked and reported consistently over time.
Most importantly, metrics must drive the right behavior: resilience, efficiency, user experience, and long-term impact.
Learn how IT teams use Tines to orchestrate, automate, and scale their operations.
