Chapter 12 - The Future of the CIO Role
The author speaks of the CIO as one of the youngest and haziest C-level roles in an organization. The title emerged in the past two decades, there is a great deal of diversity in the responsibility of CIOs across firms, and constant changes in the job description.
In all, she feels it has been given more than its fair share of scrutiny. Articles that question what a CFO should be doing, whether the position is needed at all, or whether it should be broken down into multiple offices, are rare - whereas for the CIO, they are commonplace.
It's likely that this is because technology is so new, so large, and so rapidly changing that there is a genuine need to reevaluate the CIO's role - and the constant effort to get it right has made it into something that cannot be well understood or even clearly defined
In an attempt to consolidate the mayhem, the author asked many existing CIOs how their role would change over the next ten years, and how the role of the CIO will be different in future to what it is today. The majority described a future in which the role has changed focus, in a different enough way that it would benefit from a new title. Some of the common perspectives are detailed in this chapter.
Chief Innovation Officer
Technology has been driving productivity for decades by automating basic manual processes. In general, it has done so by developing technical capabilities in advance of recognizing needs. That is, the business was generally satisfied by communicating with memos and letters and weren't looking for a solution - but when they saw email, it transformed the way they handle communications.
As such, many CIOs see their "next frontier" as being more of the same: offering technology to the business that will initiate change, rather than merely addressing the problems that the business brings to them. And given the ubiquity of computing, technology innovators are often bypassing the business, to sell ideas to the customers, who in turn demand it of the business.
Chief Improvement Officer
When technology isn't introducing new capabilities, it is making improvements to processes that drive efficiency. In that sense, CIOs are also well positioned, with an overview of business processes throughout the enterprise, to recognize inefficiencies and redundancies that can be eliminated to make the company's operations faster, cheaper, and better.
When the business looks to make process improvements, it often turns to technology to automate tasks, but there is also the ability to eliminate tasks. This gives CIOs a real opportunity to broaden their influence beyond the IT department and drive the business processes, altering the behavior of people within organizations.
That is, technology is part of a hybrid system that includes a human component as well - and in considering how technology can improve, the CIO will consider how human practices and processes can be improved, which has significant implications for the way in which the entire firm is organized and managed.
Chief Intelligence Officer
Currently, information about every element of a company is stored in its information systems - and this information becomes "intelligence" when it is leveraged in order to inform decisions and drive activities. In essence, all information available to a business is accessible to the CIO, who has thus far acted as an indifferent warden - but if he were to leverage the information in a meaningful way, he could make significant contributions to the firm.
An odd anecdote is tossed in here, but one that makes a very good point: people in technology seldom seem to pause to consider whether technology is the right answer for everything. Sometimes, it's not, as is the case where a CIO of a grocery store chain was asked to develop a solution for ensuring the freshness of fruits and vegetables in the produce department. Rather than explore RFID tags and sensors to track the movement of inventory, he came up with a very low-tech solution involving colored tape that effectively solved the problem.
Chief Shared Services Officer
In companies where business units make their own technology investments and hire vendors to provide solutions, the role of the IT department will transition away from delivering and maintaining solutions and to more of a coordination activity, managing "a smorgasbord of software and managed service providers." This will be especially likely in organizations where top management does not consider technology to be a competitive advantage.
One vision includes the elimination of the CIO role, and virtually all of the in-house IT staff and resources, because all of the IT operations will be outsourced, such that the few who remain will find that the job is more in the nature of procurement and contract negotiation with no actual hands-on involvement in the technology.
Chief Technology Officer
The typical contrast between CIO and CTO is that the CIO role deals with acquiring and adapting existing technology, whereas the CTO deals with inventing or applying new technologies. Especially in firms where many of the maintenance functions are outsourced, there will still be a need for someone who can identify opportunities where technology can be applied.
Most CIOs play both roles, managing existing technology while seeking new opportunities, but especially in recent years, with the development of new technology, many CIOs are spending more of their effort on considering how new technology (such as mobile devices) can be leveraged.
This will require a professional who is more "wired into" the technical community, and who is looking outside the organization for tools that can be brought in.
Chief Orchestration Officer
This is a bit ill-defined, but seems to synch with the "shared services" role above - in that this function is not merely about managing disparate information systems, but integrating them and making them work efficiently together.
(EN: A few more of these follow, but the author seems increasingly vague and disjoined, and I find I'm having to do more imagining on my own than understanding what is communicated by the book.)