I have often joked that CIO stands for career is over — a self-depreciating quip that made others chuckle and implied that I was taking a slight detour from becoming an executive or CEO. I considered myself a somewhat accidental CIO because I had a less traditional path to the role. CIO was a new title for me when my company was on the edge of evolution in IT, and if we hadn’t taken deliberate steps, we would have fallen.

Even before my new role was announced, I knew we didn’t have the right ingredients to evolve just yet. It was 2008 and the industry was in the midst of a downturn. Like any other business at that time, we had significant cost pressures, legacy systems that were painful to maintain or upgrade and were running out of room in a datacenter that was far too close to our disaster recovery site. Technology would play an extremely important role in the future of our business, it just wasn’t clear what that role was going to look like. It seemed like our IT services were standing in the way of their own success. Here are the steps we took to revamp our IT offering — and the steps you can take to change yours:

Get Comfortable With Competition

We had to become the agents of change. Our IT team had grown comfortable as a “monopoly” — a sole provider. Rollouts were reputably slow and our processes deterred people from wanting to work with us. As we entered a new world of cloud and software as a service, our team realized we were no longer the only game in town. Shadow IT was rampant. We now had to compete for and earn our users’ loyalty again — just like a business. We had to stop being gatekeepers and become agents of change in order to broker value or risk extinction.

Work Closely With Other Departments

IT is often considered an expense to cut in order to hit the financial objectives in other departments. I get it, I’m a CEO now. We had to make many big changes to ensure business was streamlined and processes were enhanced. For instance, to get off a burning Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, we needed to collaborate with our sales, finance and supply chain teams to propel us all forward. This is an investment that requires patience and perseverance, but it’s worth it to change the perception that IT is a cost center and order taker. IT should be seen as a strategic partner, just like every other department.

Get Your House In Order

Perception is reality. We had stagnant, slow processes — or that’s how it seemed to us. Our pride of ownership led us to build our own offerings instead of brokering a solution that would quicken our time to value. To work smarter and more efficiently, we wholeheartedly embraced lean and agile methodologies (and later, automation) to improve our approach, processes and ultimately, our delivery.