The Business Leader CIO: Pinstripes and Process

Straddling the business-technology divide is second nature for this CIO who relies on communication and collaboration to get the job done.

January 01, 2007 — CIO — Using data from the State of the CIO 2007 survey, we extracted four varieties of the CIO speciesBusiness Leader, Innovation Agent, Operational Expert and Turnaround Artist.

Definition: Business Leaders put a premium on understanding business processes; they describe communication, leadership and management skills as core competencies. Their priorities are aligning IT and business goals, using technology to improve business processes, and controlling costs.

David McCampbell can’t stand the sight of blood. That never posed a problem for him professionally until he became vice president of worldwide information services for Immucor three years ago. McCampbell is an IT leader for whom a thorough understanding of business processes and operations is paramount to his success. And at Immucor, a maker of pretransfusion diagnostics products, the business is blood. "Me working here is kind of a joke," says McCampbell, who held IT roles at software companies. But soon after he was hired, he learned to steel his stomach and dug in to the IT processes that support Immucor’s line of systems to screen in vitro blood. Even today, McCampbell spends as much time thinking about and observing things like antibody screening as he does on information technology itself. He knows that blood, not IT, drives the business. "I understand that sales are important; revenues drive business. And what’s important are the processes by which we can make those revenues grow," he says. "I can bring that to the table. That makes me as much a business leader as I am an IT leader."

McCampbell is the typical Business Leader CIO. This straddler of the technology-business divide is the dominant archetype working today, accounting for 43 percent of respondents to our "State of the CIO" survey.

For these CIOs, tactical skills like technical proficiency and in-depth knowledge of IT take a back seat to achieving their top strategic priorities: aligning IT and business goals (67 percent) and using technology to improve business processes (53 percent). Not surprising, they interact more with CXOs and businesspeople than other archetypes and spend the least time managing IT crises. And you won’t hear Business Leaders talk much about IT projects—they’re focused on business initiatives. Yet understanding technology remains critical for these CIOs to manage their staff and the expectations of the business.

Strengths

Frank John Wiggins has been all four CIO archetypes at one time or another. But at the Boston Beer Company, where he’s been director of information technology for five years, he’s firmly in the Business Leader camp. "It’s all about the beer here," says Wiggins. "It’s not about IT." Like most Business Leader CIOs, he says communication is the key to supporting and enabling the business objectives and optimizing its processes. "You can’t just read a list of business priorities on paper and say, ’Oh, I understand it all now,’" says Wiggins. "You have to know what’s truly behind the strategy to offer the best IT options."