WANTED: The Best CIO - The Ideal And The Reality
A guide for building the most effective CIO position possible, and a test to assess the state of your own role.
Fri, April 01, 2005
CIO — What makes a good CIO today? What should a CIO be responsible for? What are the best traits for the job? CIO has been posing these fundamental questions for nearly two decades. The answers have changed over time, but they've never been more critical than they are today. The CIO position is undergoing a bifurcation, with a growing gap between the strategic leaders who leverage IT to drive the business, and the stewards of data and systems whose purpose largely is to cost-manage what is perceived as a commodity. Because all types of CIOs turn to this publication to learn from their peers, the editors must respect a variety of needs. But if you ask us what the CIO ought to be, we have one answer: a strategic business leader.
The ideal CIO position—the one that will bring the most benefit to the most companies—is defined by a finite set of responsibilities, accountabilities and essential skills. We've collected these job elements into a simple, digestible document, formatted as a CIO "job spec" from a hypothetical company that understands the value of IT. The spec was developed by drawing upon data from many studies of the role, and from extensive input from CIOs and executive recruiters. It was refined and finalized jointly with the CIO Executive Council, a professional association of CIOs founded by CIO.
It's one thing to know the ideal; it's another to see where you stand against it. Our self-assessment test lets you see how the role in your company stacks up against our ideal. We hope that IT leaders, and the executives who hire them and shape company attitudes toward IT, will use both the specification and the test as guides for crafting, assessing and refining the CIO role.
Position Specification
Chief Information Officer
The Best Practices Co. Inc.
The Company
A global company with a long history, the Best Practices Co. is committed to achieving and maintaining market leadership through a business strategy that emphasizes competitive differentiation and customer loyalty. The company recognizes that its employees are its most valuable assets and that knowledge and information are critical to its success. Click here to get this Ideal CIO Position Specification in PDF format.
The Position
The CIO drives the development and delivery of world-class systems and services, as well as a technology architecture that will enable our business strategy. The CIO is responsible for ensuring that our technology strategy converges and integrates with the strategy and goals of the corporation and its business units.
