CIOs Win Modernization Support By Making The Value Argument Outside IT

Choosing which system replaces a platform a company has depended on for decades is the least difficult decision in a modernization program. Securing agreement from the finance, merchandising, and operations teams whose daily work is changed by that replacement is where these programs often get stuck. The CIO's role has moved toward that negotiation, and rewards a different skill: presenting the value argument to executives who don't work in technology. The pressure arrives earliest at companies carrying decades of legacy systems, where the cost of deferring replacement now appears as security exposure and stalled AI plans.

Charles Vojtas is Chief Information Officer at URM Stores, a large Spokane, Washington-based food distribution cooperative that provides retail support and shared services to independent supermarket member-owners, including Rosauers, Super 1 Foods, and Yoke’s Fresh Market. He came to URM from Cavender's, where as Chief Technology Officer, he built the systems foundation behind an expansion from seven stores to 34 in 18 months. Prior to that, he held senior technology roles at JCPenney, Burlington, and Academy Sports + Outdoors. Vojtas is an architect by background who came up through application development, spending most of his career arriving at organizations that needed their technology rebuilt.

"It's not about the technology itself anymore. It's about relating that technology to real world pain that our business partners are associated with," said Vojtas. The cooperative runs on a set of AS/400 applications that have kept the business going, but left it unable to answer new questions or scale at the speed it now needs. Vojtas is working on moving that functionality into a modern ERP framework, most of which will be settled in conversations with the executives and member-owners whose processes it touches, well upstream of the technology decision itself.

• Start with the problem: When a business leader arrives with a specific request, Vojtas asks what problem they are trying to solve. If they can answer, the conversation can move up to strategy or down to execution. If they can't, they don't yet understand the opportunity in front of them well enough for any solution to hold. "It doesn't matter what level of the organization you're dealing with," Vojtas said. "When you start with that question every single time, you're going to get right to the heart of the matter."

• Speaking the language: Vojtas spends more of his time explaining technology to the board and the co-op's member-owners than to his own technology team. The credibility he earns in those conversations is what allows him to move on infrastructure and security internally. "A technology leader has to already have the context of the environment that that business person is working in. They need to speak the language, the nomenclature that exists for that executive," Vojtas said. "When you're at this level, you have to already know what that is so that there's nothing lost in translation of that moment and you can take full advantage of it."

Earlier in his career, Vojtas found out what happens to a technology idea that arrives without a business reason attached. About a year after the first iPhone shipped, he proposed optimizing a previous employer's content for mobile devices so it could sell to customers on a phone. Although common practice now, the idea was turned down, and a second presentation on the marketing side drew interest without any money behind it. Vojtas went back with a different offer. "We're going to do this on our own time. It won't cost the company any money. We'll get all of our other work done, and if it fails, you can fire me," Vojtas said. The project ultimately succeeded and became one of the industry's first mobile-optimized retail sites.

• Ownership as a hurdle: The failure Vojtas sees most often on a rollout is the assumption that someone in IT will work out the business process on the business's behalf. He asks each department to document how it does the work today before anything moves into a new system, treating that documentation as the first process problem to solve. "Ownership can be the biggest hurdle. You need to feel like you're the one pushing it, that you're the one driving that change," Vojtas explained. "The second that you relinquish ownership, you've lost it forever."

• Guardrails before use cases: On AI, Vojtas thinks the hunt for a specific business case can start too early, and that the step most often skipped is getting people familiar with the tools at all. His first move is to set the security limits, so that sensitive company data can't leave in a prompt, and then let people use the tools widely enough that the worthwhile uses turn up on their own. He sees a technology that gets more precise the longer people work with it. "It's not a wrench. It's a broadsword," Vojtas said.

AI familiarity on Vojtas' leadership team spans a wide enough range to rule out a single approach. One executive was already routing much of their correspondence through a public assistant before the company had enterprise tooling in place, and the question Vojtas raises there is where the corporate data in those messages goes. Another hadn't worked with the tools at all, and needed an introduction to the assistant the company had just licensed. "They've heard of AI and they know it's something that they need to figure out and use," Vojtas said. "But this is a member of the executive team that reports to the CEO just like I do, so you have this interesting dynamic at play."

Vojtas brings both executives along by demonstrating instead of explaining. He leaned on AI heavily for the co-op's first monthly IT newsletter, running through roughly two dozen prompts before the style and the content were where he wanted them, and the CEO praised the result. With an executive who hasn't yet used the tools, he goes through prompts of his own line by line, covering what he was trying to accomplish, what he typed, and why some worked and others didn't. "My job started with relating to business and speaking their language. I think the same principle can be applied here," Vojtas concluded. "Have a conversation, be able to help them understand how it's efficient, and actually bring examples of how to use it."