Both the role and the perception of IT is changing, as IT departments shift from being seen as a cost centre to becoming a force driving productivity and innovation. Foundry’s 2025 State of the CIO report reveals that 50% of IT leaders see themselves as business leaders rather than supporting players or consultants. What’s more, this change of perception is shared by colleagues. Over half (56%) of line of business leaders Foundry surveyed said they saw CIOs and IT leaders in a business leadership role.
The challenge IT teams face is how to make the jump from focusing on their traditional operational priorities to a wider remit, looking at how new technology investments can create business value.
It’s a challenge HP has faced, both internally and in its work enabling customers to make the same transition. One common theme has emerged: the imperative to empower IT teams with new technology and data-driven services to reduce operational workloads and enable them to concentrate on business-focused roles.
For example, within HP, the HP Workforce Experience Platform allows the IT team to use real-time telemetry data to monitor the health and performance of devices and infrastructure, and the usage patterns of their users. This enables them to ensure each user has the right technology and tools, and that those devices are working effectively and not creating any digital friction.
What’s more, this telemetry data enables teams to shift from taking a service desk approach – where issues are solved reactively – to a more proactive approach where problems can be fixed in advance. As a result, 95% of issues are now resolved proactively without disrupting employees, with 50% resolved remotely through upgrades, resets or reconfiguration. With millions of data points and AI-driven insights feeding into a single consolidated platform, operational IT workloads are simplified, reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and freeing IT resources for innovation-focused tasks.
Transforming day-to-day
It’s a similar story at the Germany-based Carbon technology leader, SGL Carbon. By moving to cloud-based device provisioning and management through HP Endpoint Management, the company has been able to support an increasingly remote workforce, with HP delivering, managing and securing all user devices. New devices are now delivered direct to employees and provisioned within 30 minutes, with 80% requiring no IT intervention. Self-service access to applications and remote support and day-to-day device management further reduce the burden on the in-house IT team.
At the Swedish telecommunications giant, Ericsson, HP Device as a Service (DaaS) and Modern Management now support over 90% of the company’s devices, with new devices pre-provisioned so that workers can go from authentication to enrolment in the company network, ready to work, within 10 minutes. Built-in 5G capabilities ensure they can be effective almost anywhere.
The flexibility and scalability of Modern Management allows IT to focus more on supporting users to make the most of new capabilities, and less on maintaining the fleet. In fact, a Break/Fix agreement with HP has improved user uptime, as devices are exchanged for new replacements as required.
Rising UK football team, Wrexham AFC, has also scored by moving away from legacy devices. With a managed environment and HP Workforce Solutions, employees can order devices through a dedicated HP portal and benefit from a quick out-of-the-box setup, that gets them up and running with all the software and user credentials they need already in place.
Meanwhile, AI-powered predictive insights enable proactive troubleshooting, with automated ticketing and 24-hour expert remote support. By minimising downtime and the burden of maintaining the fleet, HP Workforce Solutions ensures that every employee can focus on their core work, while the internal IT team can look for more technology-led wins.
HP’s advanced, data-driven approach is helping customers drive costs down, in large part because devices can be retired and refreshed based on performance data rather than age – a shift that has resulted in $3.8 million of PC-refresh cost savings at HP. And by accelerating deployment and removing friction, switching to this service-led approach improves productivity and employee satisfaction.
CIOs and IT leaders now have more to do in their new roles, and not enough time or resources to do it all. With HP shouldering their operational load, they can concentrate on what’s important.