WINNER 2026
Danielle
Maurici-Arnone
Staying True to Roots While Building for a Bold, AI-Enabled Future
By Liz Dominguez
Past
Winners
CIO of the Year
Through the Years
2025: Neeraj Tomare, The Coca-Cola Co.
2024: Ann Dozier, Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits
2023: Susannah Greenberg, L'Oréal Americas
2022: Aaron Gwinner, Reynolds American
2021: Parag Agrawal, Chobani
Mike Crowe, Colgate-Palmolive
Rekha Ramesh, Tupperware
2020: Mark Vaupel, Hormel Foods
2019: Sandeep Dadlani, Mars Incorporated
2018: Jane Moran, Unilever
2017: Manjit Singh, The Clorox Company
2016: Sai Koorapati, Callaway Golf
2015: Mark Dajani, Mondelez International
2014: David Stahl, Hillshire Brands
2013: Ralph Loura, The Clorox Company
Danielle Maurici-Arnone has worked most of her career in the consumer products space, spanning categories such as health, beauty, prestige and mass-market over-the-counter. This has included roles such as CIO of North America for Reckitt's health and nutrition business and brand technology leader at The Estée Lauder Cos.
When given the opportunity to join Combe Incorporated as its global digital and technology officer in 2021, she described it as "meeting the moment."
For her bold leadership impact and strategic digital roadmap, CGT is proud to name Danielle Maurici-Arnone as its 2026 CIO of the Year — a recognition of the critical role tech-enabled and innovation-driven leadership plays in transforming organizations.
Now in its 14th year, the CIO of the Year Award honors a senior-most technology executive whose vision and execution have delivered measurable business success through the innovative use of IT.
Five and a half years ago, Combe, a 77-year-old company, stood at an inflection point. It aimed to drive growth for its portfolio of brands — which includes Just for Men, Vagisil, Seabond and Astroglide — and while it had decades of proven category and market strength, the operating platform behind it hadn't been built to scale at the pace Combe's ambitions demanded.
The company's capabilities needed a transformation at the core to fulfill Combe's strategic acquisitions and unlock the next stage of growth, and so it sought a leader who could help develop the roadmap with the brands as the north star.
Maurici-Arnone immersed herself in Combe's culture from day one, learning what mattered to the leadership team and the wider organization, and learning how decisions were made and how the business actually ran before formulating a technology strategy built to match the company's aspirations.
What Maurici-Arnone faced wasn't a modernization challenge — it was a full reconstruction of Combe's enterprise, from its systems and processes to its operating muscle, built from the ground up. And yet, for her, none of it was ever just about the technology.
"I am a technology leader who loves brands. Whether it's Jo Malone, JustForMen, Mucinex, MAC, Vagisil or Vanish, I just really enjoy the opportunity to connect with consumers’ needs because then the work is so much more meaningful and relevant," she says.
"Strategy gives you clarity on the outcome you're driving toward and measuring against. Engineering gives you the foundation that enables performance. Delivery gives you the momentum to get it done. Transformation only works when all three move together — simultaneously, gracefully, consistently and always with the consumer at the center.
A Focused, Streamlined Metamorphosis
The company's largest and most complex technology undertaking has been Project Butterfly, a multiyear, multifaceted transformation supported by several strategic business and technology partners that culminated in the consolidation of nine fragmented, disparate platforms and the implementation of a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and digital core.
"We called it Project Butterfly because that's exactly what this was — a metamorphosis. We weren't patching what existed; we were transforming the enterprise into something stronger, more agile and built for what's next," says Maurici-Arnone.
A transformation of this scale required precision and left little room for error, she says.
When establishing the building blocks for this initiative, Maurici-Arnone kept the transformation's complexity in mind, driving the notion of "one enterprise, one backbone, one planning system, one single source of truth, one team unified around value creation."
Building in
Foundational Flexibility
Before the race to this digital core could even begin, Maurici-Arnone says the company had to prepare by building the terrain — a strong data foundation. Because Combe's program touches every function in the business — sales, finance, marketing, supply chain and manufacturing — each area has to depend on data that is trusted not only in the sense of accurate transactional processing, but enough to generate the kind of insights leadership needs in real time, even mid-transformation.
"The business can't wait for every piece to be in place before it sees value. You have to deliver incrementally — each milestone building confidence that the journey ahead is on track," says Maurici-Arnone.
This foundational step helped her shape the company's transformation strategy: build the planning and execution engines on top of high-quality data first, so that the entire process can run on trusted, accurate insights.
In parallel, Combe designed a global operating model that standardized core processes and established a unified data foundation, connecting supply chain, finance and commercial data to the decisions that matter most. Rather than waiting for the ERP transformation to be complete, the company used these insights to improve working capital, accelerate cash flow and unlock capital that could be reinvested in strategic growth — including brand expansion, e-commerce, innovation and international markets.
ERP transformation is the Ironman of technology implementations. There's the preparation that happens long before anyone sees you at the starting line. There's the stamina to sustain your pace across every phase of the race. And there's the discipline to keep your head down and finish strong, trusting the finish line is there even when you can't see it yet."
Fostering
Uninterrupted Growth
In the midst of Project Butterfly, Combe acquired BioFilm, the parent company and manufacturer of personal lubricant brand Astroglide.
Rather than bolting Astroglide onto the patchwork of legacy systems Combe was actively dismantling, Maurici-Arnone's team leveraged the investments already underway in digital and technology to accelerate the integration directly onto the new platform — extending sales and distribution capabilities to BioFilm's retailers and customers without adding a single additional legacy system to an already complex landscape.
Timing was crucial. As the core ERP came online in April 2025 — bringing supply chain, finance, manufacturing and trade promotion management together holistically across every brand — Combe had a unified platform positioned to scale BioFilm from day one, rather than a fragmented one that would need to catch up later. From there, the company phased in seven additional countries, extending that same integrated foundation across the global footprint.
The company experienced benefits such as increased operational efficiency. It also improved its end-to-end visibility, allowing it to view business performance in a consolidated fashion and improving accuracy and productivity rates for planning, sourcing, production and fulfillment.
What mattered more, says Maurici-Arnone, was what didn't change: service levels held, and customer relationships continued to compound on the trust already built.
"The value proposition of being able to do more with your trading partners, and to really have that end-to-end digital capability, creates competitive differentiation," she says. "Combe is a category leader, and our customer relationships were strengthened through this transformation."
Developing the
Vision for AI
With the core ERP live, the focus has shifted to what the clean core makes possible to an active stage of turning an efficient enterprise into an intelligent one.
"The clean core that we designed and implemented is what unlocks the opportunity for employees and AI to work together to drive results," she says. "We're continuing to drive process modernization and simplification, reducing the need for complex exception processing and reconciliation, and ensuring that we're driving as much as we can into a centralized, governed decision-making model."
It's the clean, consolidated core that will allow for fewer exceptions, one-off workarounds and ungoverned pockets of data that AI agents have to stumble through. Maurici-Arnone says she is moving confidently into this next stage of agentic integration rather than treating the ERP modernization as the finish line.
The path forward will require measured steps. One of the toughest balancing acts as a leader, she says, is walking the fine line between managing risk and empowering people to learn how to use and adapt AI tools to improve their productivity and ultimately grow the business.
To set some guardrails, the organization established a cross-functional AI enablement team, of which Maurici-Arnone's organization is actively involved in, to identify use cases that cut across the IT stack and align with the company's broader objectives instead of having AI adoption happen in a piecemeal, function-by-function fashion.
While AI is certainly an enabler, Maurici-Arnone emphasizes, it is not a replacement for judgment. There will always be a need for human validation to ensure that workflows, outputs, data and results are where they need to be.
You don't get the benefit of AI from the implementation — you get it from the adoption. That's why we've built change management into the fabric of this transformation from day one, with the workforce engaged in shaping how these tools get used, not just told how to use them. The work doesn't stop at go-live. Benefit realization is ongoing; it has to be managed like any other strategic priority."
Music to Get
You Through
When asked whether there was a specific song or podcast that got her through Project Butterfly, Maurici-Arnone said she considers "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," by her favorite artist Stevie Wonder, to be her theme song — the background track that plays through complex transformations and migrations.
"I drive hard, and I expect a lot — from myself and from my team. But I've learned that staying calm under pressure is what actually keeps a team moving forward," she says. "There are so many things that can and do go wrong. The team gets fatigued, partners may change, timelines shift — but you have to continually stay on mission. My job is to make sure the team doesn’t lapse into fear or doubt. If you don't have the deep belief that you will cross the finish line, the anxiety can take hold, and it will 100% slow you down."
Advice for the
Rising Stars
For those looking to initiate their own transformative strategies, Maurici-Arnone suggests that tech leaders start with alignment.
"Get clear with leadership on what 'better' actually means for the company before you write a single line of strategy. From there, the real work begins — envisioning what comes next, defining how success will be measured, and understanding the specific role you will play in driving that change forward, not just supporting it."
That last part is what separates leaders who get noticed from those who don't, she says. Transformation can't be a side initiative or a technical exercise measured by uptime and milestones — it has to show up where the business actually feels it.
"The staying power of companies that have been in business for 70-plus years should not be discounted. They're in business for that long for a reason," she says. "Rising leaders need to understand that reason, and earn the right to build on it. The benefits of the transformation should be obvious in every single step through the P&L. That is the ultimate test of the efforts each team member makes — and when you can trace that impact back to your own work, that's what you should be proud of."
If leaders want to be seen as someone who drives outcomes and doesn't just deliver projects, says Maurici-Arnone, they must make sure their work is traceable all the way to the bottom line — because that's the proof that lasts long after the rollout is over.
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