Over the past decade, the enterprise tech stack has expanded dramatically — with hundreds of workplace apps, including numerous overlapping collaboration and productivity tools used across teams. But what began as digital empowerment has evolved into fragmentation — with disconnected systems, duplicate workflows, inconsistent data, and rising governance and security risks.
It couldn’t come at a worse time: 93% of executives say cross-functional collaboration is more crucial than ever.1 Yet, employees struggle to collaborate across tools — constantly chasing context, toggling between apps, and recreating work — while IT teams face mounting integration, licensing, and security burdens that slow transformation and increase costs.
The result is a silent productivity tax: reduced visibility, fragmented decision-making, and slower execution across the business that ultimately undermines performance. For CIOs, the next competitive edge isn’t adopting more tools — it’s creating operational excellence by uniting departments on a secure, extensible, standardized digital workplace foundation.
Standardization: the new lever for operational excellence
To reclaim control over costs, risks, and velocity, leading CIOs are bringing teams across the organization together on a unified, extensible collaboration stack that has the flexibility to be tailored to each team’s requirements. A consolidated platform unifies teams, systems, and strategy — giving IT visibility and control while empowering business units to execute more effectively and adapt quickly. With one governed foundation, IT reduces redundancy, strengthens security, and improves the employee experience.
The payoff is operational excellence, simplified governance, and more time for IT to focus on innovation rather than maintenance. CIOs gain unified visibility into system governance while delivering a more consistent, reliable user experience across the enterprise.
Driving workplace productivity and business outcomes
On a standardized digital workplace foundation, all team workflows stay connected to enterprise goals. Leaders across the organization gain end-to-end visibility into progress, dependencies, and outcomes — turning work data into actionable intelligence, operational improvements, and velocity. That enterprise-wide visibility accelerates execution, resulting in faster decision cycles, stronger alignment, and measurable improvements in workplace productivity and customer experience.
This organization-wide transformation is made possible by IT. IT moves from maintaining systems to orchestrating outcomes, becoming the bridge between business goals and the technology that powers them.
The foundation for an AI-ready enterprise
AI is quickly becoming embedded into every type of workflow. But AI can only be as effective as the systems and data it draws from. Disconnected and inconsistent information leads to inaccurate results, failed automations, and stalled value.
CIOs who standardize their collaboration ecosystem today can scale AI safely, consistently, and with confidence. Standardization creates the structured, governed data fabric AI depends on, enabling responsible innovation and future-ready operations. It provides the consistent taxonomies, permissions, and workflows that make safe and effective AI deployment possible.
When AI tools and agents have access to consistent, accurate, context-rich data across teams, they can create meaningful insights and outputs that create real business value.
Secure, governed, and future-proof
A unified digital workplace strengthens security and governance across every team. With consistent access controls and audit trails, CIOs can enforce compliance, reduce risk, and adapt to new regulations or technologies with confidence.
Future-proofing isn’t about predicting change — it’s about building a secure, adaptable foundation that can evolve with it. It doesn’t just strengthen today’s defenses but creates a governed foundation adaptable to tomorrow’s technologies and regulations.
Atlassian: A unified base for collaboration
By unifying collaboration and execution on one platform, CIOs empower teams, enable AI success, and secure the enterprise for future innovations.
With Atlassian’s Teamwork Collection, organizations can standardize on a single extensible platform connecting teams, goals, work, communication, and knowledge through AI-powered workflows. The result: a simplified, streamlined, secure collaboration ecosystem that empowers every team and positions IT to lead the modern, AI-ready enterprise.
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1Atlassian, “The State of Teams 2025”
