The CIO is dead, long live the CIO

Hard times call for hard thinking, supplemented by effective action. Achieving and sustaining our future relevance in the currently turbulent economic context will need a radical new approach to the way we deliver value to our enterprise stakeholders.

Picture credit: alicepopkorn

A good first step would be to scrap the role of Chief Information Officer and create a genuinely useful role: the Chief Integration Officer. After years of careful observation, I have reached the conclusion that the role of Chief Information Officer is not only redundant but was never needed in the first place.

When the acronym CIO first emerged, many couldn’t see any need for a Chief Information Officer at all; because they thought the title was more suited to some sort of corporate-librarian, rather than custodian of crucial commercial intelligence. And many joshed that CIO simply stood for “Career Is Over.”

The CIO role has persisted, although it remains poorly defined in too many instances.

There is, however, still no consensus about whether a CIO: is actually needed, let alone truly belongs at the top table. CIO Reporting lines are equally dilatory and liberally distributed across the CEO, CFO and COO portfolios.

I have followed numerous CIO debates over the years and here are a few of the headline issues that have cropped up most regularly:

• The CIO has the best overall perspective of the enterprise
• A CIO should automatically have right to a place on every Executive Board?
• We could do even more with technology, if the CIO was properly empowered
• Board-level colleagues don’t really think of the CIO as a business-person

But without a clear-cut definition, the role of Chief Information Officer can be very confusing indeed, particularly when too readily combined with its ‘logical’ counterpart: a Chief Technology Officer. This double-act has been known to create double the confusion for all concerned. Nobody could ever accuse us of doing things by halves.

Some prefer to interpret the CIO role as Chief Infrastructure Officer, with the incumbent happily embroiled in the bowels of technology, instead of managing the life-blood of an effective enterprise. While other, perhaps more ‘forward-thinkers’ wish to translate the CIO term into quite a different beast: i.e. Chief Innovation Officer. But that is an even more ephemeral concept than Chief Information Officer.

Sometimes I think that there are probably as many interpretations of CIO as there are holders of the post. So I suppose one more won’t hurt.

My proposal for the next generation CIO is as Chief Integration Officer, a job that can be universally defined and a key corporate function for the foreseeable future.

Here is my reasoning. No individual, group, organisation or enterprise is a stand-alone venture. At every level, our world is constituted from constantly interacting dynamic systems and these living systems engage with each other, directly or indirectly. In a joined-up world, successful systems must effectively integrate with each other for mutual benefit.

And yet, when it comes to our formal business systems [aka IT] we do not yet achieve seamless integration. For sure, lots of people talk passionately about extended value chains, partnership collaboration or electronic data interchange. But when push comes to shove most enterprises have big gaps in their information systems – internally and externally.

That’s where the CIO as Chief Integration Officer comes in – a consistently, clearly defined, role that will facilitate trans-enterprise integration, by providing natural mutual points of engagement and communication.

So what is the function of a Chief Integration Officer?

To ensure that their enterprise is coherent and congruent, internally and externally, by integrating effectively with other bodies: individual, corporate or statutory.

How is this different from the function of a Chief Information Officer? Significantly different for many reasons including…

Firstly the current parallel Chief Technology Officer(CTO job leads to great confusion of boundaries/ responsibilities in many organisations. With the CTO reporting to the Chief Integration Officer, any uncertainty of accountability for end-to-end integration of people, process and technology would be removed.

Secondly, the role of the Chief Integration Officer would be unequivocally recognised as a top-table function, rather than the uncertain position of a Chief Information Officer who is often kept beyond arm’s length from the top-table.

This isn’t just about job titles though, it’s about delivering effective information systems, in a world populated by uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity.

You may also like to read:

• Nobody needs a Chief Information Officer
• Long Live the CIO!
• Who says there has to be a function called IT?
• Goodbye to the Government CIO
• CIO = Cheap Infrastructure Officer?