InformationWeek Podcast: Moving beyond internal IT modernization to ROI

Kyndryl CTO Antoine Shagoury and ZoomInfo Chief Strategy and AI Officer Russell Levy discuss turning modernization into real value.

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth,Senior Editor,InformationWeek

January 28, 2026

Enterprises often feel pressured to say they are keeping pace with the latest IT innovations, even when there is no immediate internal gain. Boards of directors, customers and members of the C-suite may welcome signs that a company is modernizing, but how do those efforts translate into real returns?

What litmus tests do CTOs, CIOs and other tech leaders use to assess results from modernization initiatives? And how do they explain to stakeholders that the new, much-hyped tech they want might not deliver measurable returns?

In this episode, Antoine Shagoury, CTO at Kyndryl, and Russell Levy, chief strategy and AI officer at ZoomInfo, discussed these issues. They also explored what tech leaders need from the operations side of the business to align modernization efforts with meaningful outcomes.

Levy and Shagoury also tackled the “Questionable Ideas ‘R’ Us” tabletop exercise, facing off with hobgoblins, kobolds and gremlins with misguided ideas about achieving ROI from modernization.

About the Author

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth

Senior Editor, InformationWeek

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth edits stories for InformationWeek as well as reports on C-suite tech leaders across a multitude of industries and tech disciplines. He also hosts the InformationWeek Podcast, which brings together CIOs, CTOs, and other C-suite leadership to discuss their different approaches to addressing shared challenges. He joined InformationWeek in 2019, initially as a Senior Writer covering cloud computing and DevOps. He became a Senior Editor in 2023.

His work with InformationWeek garnered American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBE) awards in 2024. This included "Could the DOJ's Antitrust Trial vs Google Drive More Innovation?" as part of the team’s Government Coverage, which collectively won a Bronze National award and a gold Northeast regional award, as well as a bronze regional award for a Web Feature Series on the environmental impact of data-driven organizations published during Earth Month. That award included his story "How Do Supercomputers Fit With Strategies for Sustainability?"

He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.

Joao-Pierre can be reached via email at [email protected]

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