Simplification isn’t about cutting costs, it’s about building resilience and driving growth

Simplification was once shorthand for trimming budgets and keeping the lights on.

At ADAPT’s CIO Edge, leaders made clear that the term has evolved.

In today’s environment of board scrutiny, geopolitical volatility, and rapid AI adoption, simplification is no longer about housekeeping.

It is about building the foundations for resilience and growth.

Each technology decision now carries the weight of a commercial bet, with CIOs expected to deliver measurable returns while preparing their organisations for systemic shocks.

Technology rollouts are no longer projects, they are bets the board expects to win

Jessica Eyes, Digital Leader at McKinsey & Company, challenged CIOs to stop treating ERP and cloud programs as operational upgrades.

She argued that boards increasingly see these rollouts as bets with high financial stakes, where failure to deliver adoption or value creates immediate leakage.

She also warned that stalled transformations cause direct business underperformance, not just technical overruns.

That perspective found a practical echo in David Walker, Chief Technology Officer at Westpac Group.

Rather than speaking in technical terms, he translated the burden of complexity into a commercial drag.

By showing that every dollar invested in change incurred an additional 70 cents in hidden costs from technical debt, he created a language the board could rally behind.

In his case, simplification became less about modernisation and more about restoring organisational competitiveness.

The theme of linking simplification directly to business performance carried through to Telstra.

Nathan Gumley, Group Owner for Strategy and Transformation, and Channa Seneviratne, Executive for Technology Engagement and Advancement, described how their network transformation paired disciplined architecture with AI-driven optimisation.

With more than 100 million network events each day, automation was essential.

The payoff was not only reduced operational cost but also new resilience capabilities, such as prioritising emergency service connectivity during disasters and dynamically adapting customer experiences.

ADAPT’s research reinforces this shift in expectations: half of Australian CIOs now say they must prove ROI from major rollouts within 12 months.

In this climate, every deployment is a board-level wager on resilience and growth. 

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Pilots and projects are distractions unless they become platforms people adopt

If the first theme was about elevating programs into board-level bets, the next was about ensuring those bets scale.

For ANZ Bank, Peter Barrass, Divisional Chief Information Officer, explained how payments were lifted out of siloed projects and redefined as a reusable platform.

By consolidating processes across retail, commercial, and institutional divisions, and even extending the platform as a white-labelled service to smaller banks, ANZ turned simplification into a mechanism for both efficiency and revenue creation. 

The cultural dimension was brought to life by Loren Somerville, Chief Information Officer at The Lottery Corporation.

Where Peter highlighted structural reuse, Loren focused on embedding simplification into how teams work.

She empowered developers to surface bottlenecks and technical debt themselves, rather than waiting for top-down mandates.

In her words, simplification gained traction because it was owned by the culture, not imposed as a program. 

Education brought another lens.

Sinan Erbay, Chief Information Officer at RMIT University, shared how the university built its own “Virtual Assisted Learning” platform.

The secure, in-house system gave students access to generative AI for assignments, translations, and interview practice.

By offering an internal alternative to commercial tools, RMIT ensured AI adoption was safe, equitable, and embedded in everyday learning.

The question of adoption extended into frontline enablement.

Matthew Barratt, Regional Vice President at WalkMe, and Simon Carlson, Senior Director at WalkMe, illustrated how digital adoption platforms prevent new systems from collapsing under user friction.

In one case, a payroll rollout involving 30,000 employees was kept on track by overlaying guided workflows rather than forcing a costly rollback.

At Flight Centre, the same approach was applied to AI, embedding decision support directly into booking flows so staff could deliver better service without needing to master prompt engineering. 

ADAPT data reveals only 13% of CIOs report successful AI deployment.

Yet when initiatives focus on solving cost or efficiency problems, success rates rise sharply to 86% compared to just 9% when they remain experimental.

The lesson is that pilots are distractions unless they mature into platforms people actually use. 

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Simplification is not housekeeping, it is the new resilience strategy

While adoption ensures value today, resilience ensures continuity tomorrow.

Defence leaders made this link explicit.

Peter Alexander, Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Defence, said simplification is essential to fight and win in the digital age.

Defence must reduce silos across its forces and coalition partners, with unified systems now critical to operational effectiveness.

Financial services echoed the same concern from a different angle.

Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer at NGM Group, warned that every duplicated banking system doubles regulatory obligations and cyber risk.

He argued that simplification frees resources for innovation rather than forcing organisations to “spend twice on the bad”.

The human toll of complexity was brought forward by Melissa Bischoping, Senior Director of Security and Product Design Research at Tanium.

She warned that 69% of IT staff report burnout, which turns workforce fatigue into a resilience risk of its own.

For her, automation and proactive vulnerability reduction were not efficiency plays but critical levers for protecting the people responsible for defending infrastructure.

That argument found reinforcement back at Defence, where Chris Crozier, Chief Information Officer at the Department of Defence, framed simplification not as operational tidiness but as a resilience strategy for contested environments.

When national security depends on digital agility, fragile IT estates are liabilities.

The urgency is visible in the data.

ADAPT research shows 37% of CIO budgets in 2025 will be consumed by “keeping the lights on,” leaving little capacity for innovation.

Combined with workforce burnout, it paints a picture of resilience at risk unless simplification becomes a deliberate strategy.

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Recommended actions for CIOs

• Prioritise ROI visibility: Define measurable outcomes before rollouts begin and track delivery in three, six, and twelve-month stages.
• Scale what works: Move beyond pilots quickly by embedding adoption into workflows and designing platforms for reuse across divisions.
• Simplify for resilience: Consolidate duplicated systems, reduce compliance overhead, and automate routine tasks to free capacity for innovation.
• Address human limits: Invest in automation and exposure management to protect overworked IT teams and reduce burnout.
• Engage boards in business terms: Translate technology choices into financial and risk metrics that resonate with executives outside IT.

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Simplification has become a strategic discipline that enables resilience and growth.

Complexity erodes value by slowing adoption, amplifying cyber risk, and exhausting scarce talent.

The challenge now is to pursue simplification deliberately, framing every investment as a bet that reduces fragility or accelerates capability.

Success requires treating simplification as a continuous strategy, aligning it to business outcomes and embedding adoption into culture.

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