Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences, and are invited to suggest changes or additions here.
Current Thinking Includes:
A review of resources making referencing to the CIO position reveals a very long list of suggested traits for the role. Rather than providing an aggregation of all those items here, we might focus on what appear to be the macro-level differences for this specific role versus the positions that come before it in the IT career ladder. While promotions within the IT domain will usually carry greater scope (more people, portfolio, budget responsibility), the consensus view is that movement to CIO is qualitatively different in several ways.
While continuing to be responsible for the successful performance of the IT organization, the CIO’s focus necessarily expands to the health and success of the entire business, with an expectation that a substantial positive impact will be made to the organization. The dozens of skills learned and practiced over the course of the CIO’s career are leveraged not just toward a larger IT staff, but also to the organization and its needs. A deep understanding of the business, market dynamics, financial drivers and opportunities are likely to be new skills over the demands of the past, and are a challenge for many CIOs (see Business Alignment).
One opportunity for the new CIO, which appears to be under-leveraged in many organizations, is the chance to look across the business units, and with an understanding of needs and strategy, help to set the agenda and drive it forward – rather than fall into a reactive role that only manages the ‘incoming’ from the business units. This proactive leadership role is somewhat hard to quantify (like most executive roles), but peers within an organization know it when they see it in action.
Therefore, rather than focusing on a arbitrary checklist of skills, a future CIO may ask themselves if they are truly viewed as a strategic business leader within their organization and their peers? If not, what are the behavior changes they will need to undertake, considering the dynamics of their particular organization, to make that so? The “business leader” label is perhaps the most important question the CEO will be asking upon consideration of a candidate for the role, and it will likely be a requirement to retain the Board’s confidence as well. Finally, as is often said, a promotion is an acknowledgement of something that has already occurred, rather than an invitation for someone to step up to a new role. A successful candidate for CIO will likely make this effort, and will be viewed in this manner well before the CIO position ever opens up.
CIO Australia: The Pathway to CIO
Late last year, the IBM Institute for Business Value went to the trouble of interviewing more than 2500 CIOs around the world for its Global CIO Study — the largest face-to-face study of CIOs ever conducted. The study’s report, “The New Voice of the CIO”, found that successful CIOs do three things: drive innovation, improve return on investment and increase the impact IT has on the business.
CIO Peer Research: A Model for IT Career Advancement
Senior IT executives live and operate in a world of greater abstraction. Rather than focusing on the team leaders’ objectives of hitting deadlines and staying within budgets, CIOs and their C-suite colleagues are ideally judged on organizational measures such as growth rates, profitability, brand strength, competitive advantage and market share.
CIO New Zealand: Your leadership portfolio: The view from C-level
…the progression to IT Function Head CIO requires the individual to place a much greater emphasis on the development of broad business skills, underpinned by people skills.
CIO New Zealand: Outstanding CIOs most resemble outstanding CEOs
…as IT Senior Leaders advance to the C level, there is a sharp shift beyond good management competencies, such as Team Leadership, into more organizational alignment competencies, such as Change Leadership, and business-focused competencies such as Commercial Orientation, which is identifying and seizing on business opportunities.
The portrait that emerges of the outstanding CIO is that of a business leader with strategic insight, someone who has both the experience and capability to leverage technology investments to drive measurable and sustainable business improvement or change.
CIO New Zealand: Moving from senior IT leader to C-level
That watershed between Senior IT Leader and Function Head CIO illustrates the interdependence of specific leadership competencies and the movement from reactive to active to proactive that results in increasingly longer term organisational impact from leadership actions. It is the stage at which the nature of the relevant competencies themselves requires a broader organisational perspective and field of activity.
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Alternative Views Include:
Alternative Views may be summarized here as the historical gap in business expectations vs. performance for CIOs, as well as alternatives to the “traditional” path to the CIO position, if there is such a thing. There are some who doubt that the majority of leaders coming up through the technical ranks will have the business aptitude (or interest) to be a successful CIO when the opportunity arises. This is supported by the large percentage of respondents to yearly surveys who state that their IT management just doesn’t understand their business (see Business Alignment).
Increasingly, people in CIO roles are coming from non-traditional backgrounds, either because they have demonstrated the ability to pick up what is needed on the technical side, or because their organizations have made the determination that it will be easier for them to to learn IT, than for an IT leader to soak up the business from their side of the fence. Finally, many organizations are now feeling increasing flexibility to place a non-technical person in the chief IT role after outsourcing or virtualizing enough of their operations that they consider the technical risk to be manageable for a non-technical leader.
CIO Australia: The Pathway to CIO
“Although CIOs are an emerging presence in the executive suite, few IT executives have the business qualifications or capitalist’s killer instinct for making money.”
If you want to be a CFO you become a CPA; engineers can become a certified engineer. As CIOs we come from many different places — some of them weird and wonderful. So we need to define a career path for people to become a CIO.
CIO.com: CIOs Who Took an Alternative Route to the Top
…their unlikely career choices provided perspective and management expertise that made them more agile leaders and better problem solvers, not to mention that it better positioned them to serve as that proverbial bridge between technology and the business.
“As this becomes more about process than technology, an IT background is not as relevant as a background in business,” she explains. “That’s why you’re finding people falling into the CIO role from all kinds of diverse backgrounds.”
Harvard Business Review: Should Your Next Job Be CIO?
…almost 26% of the CIOs responding were executives who had never served in IT before becoming CIO. That last fact suggests that the CIO’s office is becoming an attractive destination for executives throughout the enterprise. Not only are CIOs reaching higher — somebody outside IT actually wants to be CIO.
Forbes.com: CIO Job: Stopping Point Or End Goal?
A new breed of CIO has emerged from the ranks of business rather than technology to deal with a whole different set of problems. Instead of managing just the complexity of technology they are skipping that step and focusing instead on how the technology can be used competitively. In their world, business trumps technology rather than the other way around.
It’s also too early to tell whether a business background is better than a technology background for the same role. Both can be learned, but which is more important as a foundation is unknown. Many of these executives are moving into positions where the most difficult technology problems of today already have been addressed. Those companies that are farthest down the virtualization and outsourcing path are the ones with the most current job descriptions for CIOs.
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