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State of the CIO - The Changing CIO Role

By Allan Holmes

January 01, 2006 — CIO —

In the very first"State of the CIO" special issue, published in 2002, we asked several knowledgeable observers to speculate on the future of the CIO role. Some predicted that the job would split into two distinct types: a strategic CIO who would focus on creating value through technology, and a tactical CIO whose primary goal would be to run an efficient IT shop. The latter type, the experts opined, would ultimately find his job outsourced or absorbed by business units.

Said Peter Weill, director of the Center for Information Systems Research at the Sloan School of Management at MIT:"The CIO’s expertise is in communicating to business colleagues the importance of IT—and more important, getting the governance right. It’s a strategic mentality...[the service-oriented] CIO—along with the utility mentality—will disappear. That is because IT operations can be run as efficiently by an ASP."

Ellen Kitzis, then group VP for executive programs at Gartner, predicted"there will be a bifurcation in the CIO role—one part will be focused on strategy and the other on execution. Those [CIOs] focused on execution will move toward the CTO slot. The strategist will focus on issues such as business-IT alignment, uncovering IT-enabled business opportunities in the enterprise and finding ways for IT to streamline the business processes in the value or supply chain."

These predictions were correct, but only in part. For many CIOs, the strategic aspect of their jobs has become much more prominent."I’ve pretty much stepped back [from technical operations], and now I focus mostly on working with the business community, making sure I have a clear understanding of business processes and needs," says Henry Eckstein, CIO and VP at York Insurance Services Group, which provides data and services to financial institutions. Susan Kozik, CIO for retirement services company TIAA-CREF, observes that"We [in IT] are working with partners we could have never predicted years ago. The business is becoming much more aware of how information runs through the veins of technology."

The strategic focus of CIOs is reflected in"The State of the CIO 2006" survey. The three activities on which you spend the most time are collaborating with other CXOs and business executives, making strategic systems decisions, and working on strategic business planning. Among the personal skills most crucial to your success on the job, strategic thinking and planning rated number two—behind the ability to communicate, presumably with those other CXOs and business executives.

Yet execution and efficiency is still very much on CIOs’ minds. Far from having left operations behind or offloaded it to others, you said in"The State of the CIO 2006" survey that your number-one barrier to job effectiveness today is an overwhelming backlog of projects and requests. (See"The Number-One Problem: The Project Backlog," Page 52.) You predict that IT’s top impact on the enterprise in 2006 will be reducing business costs through efficiency or increased productivity—ahead of higher-value activities such as increasing business innovation and improving competitive advantage.

 

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