The CIO Juggling Act

Nearly half of CIOs today hold two or more executive roles. It’s a testament to their business value: Good CIOs are well positioned to think strategically about their organization’s activities and processes, and to drive new value. But there are downsides, too. Our cover story, “CIO++,” by Senior Editor Stephanie Overby, explores what this trend means for CIOs and IT.

One way busy executives increase their effectiveness is by networking intelligently with like-minded peers in their professional circle. Now, CIO and LinkedIn have partnered to enhance your ability to network through our site and theirs. We’ve started a CIO group on LinkedIn; it’s growing fast, with over 1,000 members today. And LinkedIn is serving CIO content to all its IT professional members.

We’re also bringing some of LinkedIn to CIO.com. To see who in your network works at companies covered in our articles—or at companies hiring in our CIO Wanted career listings—click on the blue “in” logo you’ll find across CIO.com. You can also see which connections are attending CIO conferences, and use your LinkedIn profile to automatically fill in conference registration forms. Check it out, and tell me what you think.

Why are we doing this? Changes in publishing and social networking mean we need to extend our relationships and get our content into the places our readers spend their time. We’ve started a CIO group in Facebook, and we have a CIOMagazine feed in Twitter. Every day, we promote our content to social media sites around the Web.

CIOs are catching the Web 2.0 bug, too. In “Wiki While You Work,” on Page 36, we explore how to successfully deploy a wiki and the latest technology options. Many CIOs are also using internal blogs to foster collaboration, and some publish public blogs. There are even a few on Twitter—I know of at least eight.

Do Web 2.0 technologies help you get more done? How can we help you to be more productive? E-mail me at lundberg@cio.com—or DM me in Twitter!