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CIO First Look

May 24, 2025

At first glance of today’s newsletter lineup, you can see plenty of reasons why CIOs are being kept up at night, from what’s defining the role today and navigating the S/4HANA migration, to wielding synthetic data and coming to terms with new AI protocols. Yet the overriding theme throughout is IT leaders today aren’t only clear on the work in front of them, they’re fired up for the hard miles to ensure success to the business.
Take Christian Posta, global field CTO at cloud management vendor Solo.io. “AI is already moving extremely fast, but speed without standardization just leads to chaos,” he says. “Standard protocols are the difference between going fast in a haphazard fragmented direction and scaling with intention.” Then there’s Tim Bilali, chief application officer at IPG overseeing its transition to S/4HANA. “You need to evaluate the cost to redesign business processes and optimize them according to best practices and ROI,” he says. And Joshua Bellendir, SVP of IT and CIO of WHSmith North America, sums it up by asking, “How do we continually get better and become a more mature organization?” And who can’t get excited about that?

Carl Friedmann, Executive Regional Editor, CIO

5 questions defining the CIO agenda today

Perennial issues dominate today’s CIO agenda: how to drive innovation while ensuring secure and modern IT operations, a workforce tuned for the future, and a balance sheet prepared to contain costs as they fluctuate.

But while CIO.com’s latest State of the CIO survey identifies AI initiatives, security work, modernization efforts, and talent needs as top drivers for IT leaders’ agendas again this year, subtle shifts in how best to tackle that work can be teased out by the key questions IT leaders face in each of these areas right now.

9 mins

The road to S/4HANA: How CIOs are managing SAP ECC’s end of support

With the deadline for SAP ECC end of support nearing, CIOs face major decisions, and likely headaches, as they consider whether and how to transform their core ERP systems for a new era.

At issue is SAP’s mandate for its customer CIOs: Transition to S/4HANA by 2027 or face extended maintenance fees to remain on ECC. However, the broad install base for SAP’s flagship ECC ERP system has been slow on its S/4HANA uptake, with almost two-thirds yet to make the leap off ECC as of the end of 2024, according to Gartner.

11 mins

Synthetic data’s fine line between reward and disaster

Up to 20% of the data used for training AI is already synthetic — that is, generated rather than obtained by observing the real world — with LLMs using millions of synthesized samples. That could reach up to 80% by 2028 according to Gartner, adding that by 2030, it’ll be used for more business decision making than real data. Technically, though, any output you get from an LLM is synthetic data.

AI training is where synthetic data shines, says Gartner principal researcher Vibha Chitkara. “It effectively addresses many inherent challenges associated with real-world data, such as bias, incompleteness, noise, historical limitations, and privacy and regulatory concerns, including personally identifiable information,” she says.

10 mins