Execution capacity and speed are the new currency of business. Traditional IT modernisation can no longer deliver them. But the CIO who can design their organisation to accelerate execution through Proof of Value can move significantly further, significantly faster.
Christina Sophie Worsøe
Director
Okay. It may be a little blunt to say "stop planning modernisation". But I see it again and again. The CIO or IT director facing a modernisation with two possible paths forward. Plan A delivers in two and a half years. Plan B in four and a half.
Replacing the monolith. Procuring a platform. All in on SAP. A multi-year roadmap to roll everything out. These are not bad decisions or bad methods. But both CIOs and steering committees feel the pressure to accelerate execution capability.
So how long can you actually afford to spend on modernisation in 2026?
Execution capability and speed are the most critical factor of business in 2026. They determine whether we reach the market in time. And whether customers get what they are waiting for before someone else delivers it.
Traditional IT modernisation has a speed problem. It only delivers in two and a half years. That is not speed. That is promises. And a little hope.
But speed is not the goal in itself. The real goal is execution capability under constant change. The ability to prioritise correctly and make good decisions, even when the basis shifts mid-project. Modernisation is a means. Execution capability is the goal.
Execution capability and speed. That is the most critical factor in 2026.
Traditional IT modernisation has its own logic. IT directors and CIOs draw up a multi-year plan. Get the steering committee to approve it. Choose a strategic vendor. Lay out an implementation track with phases, milestones, and go-live dates. And then maintain focus on that plan for 30 to 60 months.
That made sense when systems were monoliths that had to be replaced entirely. When integration was expensive and required heavy architectural design and an extensive requirements specification. When the market moved slowly. And when AI was not a technology you could build on and accelerate with.
In 2026, none of those assumptions hold.
You no longer need to replace everything to modernise something. You swap out the parts that are genuinely holding the business back. The rest stays in place.
A layer of AI agents orchestrates across legacy, automates processes, identifies logic, and exposes data. This often replaces large parts of the modernisation you thought you needed to do. But agentic solutions solve process logic. They do not solve data quality. The foundation must hold.
The market shifts quarterly. AI models almost monthly. A specification written in January can be outdated before it reaches contract.
It has never been cheaper to build a prototype that works. And it has never been more expensive to guess wrong in a multi-year plan. That has turned the risk calculation upside down.
The four shifts make a different mindset necessary. Both in enterprise architecture and in the technical design phase towards a Proof of Value.
The classic designer we know does not build first. The designer sketches from a recognised problem. Tests. Adjusts. A furniture designer builds a prototype in cardboard. Holds it up against reality. Switches between materials. Only when the form is right does the real building begin.
In the same way, the skilled technical designer or solutions architect knows that constraints are a gift. Security requirements. Compliance. Legacy. These are the conditions for finding the right solution. And the IT director who thinks like a designer treats AI as a new opportunity. Not as a feature or as a separate AI track.
This is not about post-its or workshops with creative exercises. It is not "design thinking" as a discipline. It is technology design as a discipline. It is the ability to identify the problem that needs to be solved and addressed, before the investment, before the tender , before the contract, and certainly before the platform choice.
In a CIO context, 'design' here means decision support at precisely the moment when it costs least to change direction. The technical and architectural foundation that determines whether you can execute quickly, change course along the way, and keep security and compliance in place.
The design approach does not only deliver speed. It delivers the ability to change direction without starting over. And to test different technologies. That is the difference between a roadmap and a genuine execution capability.
In our Resilient CIO Report from Q1 2026, we asked 14 Danish IT directors about their AI initiatives. 13 out of 14 had active projects. Only 3 had a plan for scaling them.
That is not a technology problem. It is a design problem. When we have not designed how value moves from pilot to production, the pilot becomes a destination. It should have been a stepping stone.
We probably cannot talk about 'design' without also talking about the democratisation of design capability. Namely, Vibe Coding. While modernisation drags on, something else is happening under the radar. People in the business are vibe-coding apps and solutions outside of IT. It may work for six months.
IT directors experience a blind spot. And quickly a red rag. Because it is not designed well enough to last. No guardrails. No architecture. No path from prototype to production. It does not survive an audit. And it does not scale when more departments get the same idea.
Yet another reason why CIOs need to rethink their approach to modernisation.
We are tempted to rename modernisation acceleration of execution capability. The approach has three phases. The principle is simple: work out what the task actually is going forward, when - as an IT director - you need to lift the business and its competitiveness. Test whether new technology or alternative paths can handle the task, before you choose a platform or frame it as a modernisation of core systems.
Here are a few guidelines for how we apply design as a mindset to drive execution speed.
The result often looks different from what the IT director envisaged when the process started. In the best case, you avoid a major upgrade altogether. In the next best case, you make it significantly smaller.
Find a use case or process that is genuinely holding the business back. Or where you could drive growth if data, architecture, or IT resources were not a bottleneck. Isolate it in an exploratory track with its own budget, its own governance, and limit the timeframe to, for example, 90 days.
Test different paths towards a solution. Preferably independently of existing systems. But within the regulatory and IT principles you are subject to. In a great many cases, an agentic framework can handle a large part of what you would otherwise have modernised away. Measure commercial value. Not technical progress. Stop the initiative if value has not been documented after six months.
When the experimental approach has proven its value, the solution is designed into the architecture in earnest. This is where resilience-by-design is built in. This is where guardrails are formalised. This is where security and robustness are drawn in from the first line. Controlled innovation. Not as an experiment that scales outside governance, but as a capability that is ready to carry the business's next step.
The CIO of the future is measured on the pace of the business. Not the uptime of the systems.
We have the tools. We have the method. And we have tangible results within 2-3 months. Because we start with design.
Core modernisation in 20 of the normal time
We delivered a modernisation of a business-critical legacy solution in 20 of the time it would normally have taken. With not a single regression error. The use of the design phase was the reason we knew precisely what to build - and what not to build.
Smarter operations: From weeks to seconds
At one client, tendering process on complex heat exchangers has been reduced from weeks to seconds. An exploratory process that proved its value within 90 days and is now scalable.
700,000 product records validated every day
At another client, 700,000 products are validated around the clock. So sales, procurement, and support work on data that holds.
