How Top CIOs Are Measuring the Real ROI of IT Automation

Why It Matters

The change broadens the ROI calculus for IT automation, accelerates backlog clearance and empowers frontline teams to fix everyday frictions, boosting productivity and lowering long-term development costs. This could materially speed digital transformation and reduce reliance on scarce engineering resources.

Summary

CIOs say decades-old automation models—prioritizing big ROI projects through scarce engineering capacity—left thousands of small but painful process frictions unaddressed because of a trade-off triangle between speed, cost and completeness. Advances in agentic engineering and AI-enabled low-code tooling are upending that model by letting business process owners directly design and deploy automation with a single technical partner, shrinking delivery times from months to days. That shift makes many previously unaffordable automations economically viable, enables bespoke, human-centered workflows, and supports rapid, temporary experiments. Executives report this creates higher-fidelity, tailored solutions and a new tolerance for fail-fast iterations.

Original Description

In this archived keynote session, Rachel Lockett, vice president of business technology solutions and operations at Surescripts, and Andrew Graf, chief product officer at TeamDynamix, explain how to identify the most impactful workflows to automate first, overcome common implementation hurdles, and create a framework for measuring ROI and long-term success.

This segment was part of our live webinar titled “The CIO's Playbook for Accelerating IT Automation in 2026” The event was presented by InformationWeek and TeamDynamix on April 23, 2026.

View the entire “CIO's Playbook for Accelerating IT Automation in 2026” live webinar on demand here: https://informatechtarget.tradepub.com/free/w_defa10481/prgm.cgi?a=1