The Key To Bridging IT Software And Hardware? Integrated Enterprise Systems.

The CIO role has evolved into something far more operational than technical. Today, the job is to align fragmented systems so the business moves as one. When integration fails, customers feel it in delays, errors, and rework. When it works, friction fades and the organization operates with a level of coordination that builds trust rather than testing it.

At Jurgensen Companies, a family-owned infrastructure company, CIO Parag Pujari has spent the last four years addressing exactly that issue. He arrived to find siloed systems, heavy manual intervention, and frequent rebills that surfaced as customer-facing errors. Pujari's career spans construction, retail, insurance, government, healthcare, and utilities, with prior leadership roles at Speedway LLC and CNO Financial Group. His mandate was not simply to modernize technology, but to connect operations, finance, and field activity into a coordinated enterprise model where integration directly supports trust.

"The role of IT has fundamentally changed. We're no longer just maintaining systems, we're orchestrating the business itself, because every integration decision we make ultimately shapes customer trust, speed, and reliability," said Pujari. The starting point was straightforward and painful. Disconnected systems meant billing errors reached customers before anyone caught them internally. Rebills were common, trust eroded, and the cost of rework compounded across the business.

• Eliminating the rebill cycle: "When I started here four years ago, our systems didn't talk to each other well enough," Pujari explained. "It required a lot of manual intervention, and when we billed the customer, they used to come back and say this is not the right number. There was a lot of rebilling." Over the following three years, his team replaced the ERP system and modernized core processes to bring operations and billing into alignment. "Now the majority of our systems talk to each other, reducing the amount of rebills. We have a happier customer. Are we 100% out of the woods? Not yet. But we are one step closer."

• Customer experience as an integration outcome: Pujari framed the broader shift in IT's role around friction reduction: omnichannel consistency, zero-touch transactions through platforms like Apple Pay and Google Pay, personalization at scale, and real-time responsiveness through edge computing and unified CRM visibility. "Privacy is very critical and that gains the customer trust," he noted. "It provides an experience where the customer feels they want to be engaged."