Top Ten List for CIOs

The Chief Information Officer title has been around for some time now. The title is often used to describe the person who heads the Information Technology function for a business. While this is normally true, I believe that this title should be restricted to leaders who recognize the value that Information technology should be providing for a business.

Too many CIOs are still "managing the business" That is, they are responsible for all of the technical staff and hardware and manage the day-to-day operations of the IT business. While this is a necessary function, it doesn't add value.

The Society for Information Management (SIM) have completed a study of CIOs and came back with the following list of priorities:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction.
2. IT and Business alignment.
3. Business agility and speed to market.
4. Process re engineering.
5. IT Cost reduction.
6. IT reliability and efficiency.
7. IT Strategic planning.
8. IT innovations.
9. Security and privacy.
10. CIO Leadership role.

The focus here is clearly on the business and not on IT as the driver. This says one of two things: Either the CIOs polled are taking action or at least the message is getting through.

In the past, too much of the focus has been on Reliability and efficiency (#6) or on Security (#9). While these are important, they are what the IT operation needs to deliver. The CIO needs to be focused on the business.

See Top Ten Presentation.

What's a Chief Information Officer (CIO)?

In doing a search yesterday, I ran across hundreds of websites that stated that they offered CIO services.

When organizations first started to make use of computers, they called the manager of the group various names from Data Processing Manager, to IT Manager and most recently CIO. While most of these positions had a very similar role, that of managing the activities of the folks that supported computers at the company, the CIO was supposed to identify a new role, that of a business person who was responsible for helping the business to exploit IT to make it more profitable and effective.

While many CIOs still manage the IT function, it detracts from their ability to exploit technology to improve the business. If IT is outsourced, there still is a need for a CIO. Would CIOs be more effective in this situation? Could they add more value to the business? If the business didn't want to outsource would it make sense for the IT Manager and CIO to be two separate positions?

Many small businesses have outsourced IT support, because they just can't afford to hire the type of computer skills that they need. Even if they don't outsource, their computer staff do not have the business skills to help them take advantage of technology.

If they check the Internet for a CIO, most of what they find is IT support businesses that call themselves CIOs. They aren't. They are just computer and network support companies. They don't try to understand thye business, they simply fix what's broken.

If we really want to help small businesses to exploit Information Technology, then we need to focus on their business and not on fixing computer problems. That's not to say that keeping technology stable is not important (it is critical), but we should be past that. Maybe we need a new title instead of CIO, since CIO is being misused so much.