For the last half-century, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has received growing attention from researchers, analysts, consultants, recruiters and, occasionally, the media.1 While much has been written about this role, an unambiguous description of what exactly being a CIO actually entails has yet to emerge. Indeed, what is apparent from all the words that have been written is that the role of the CIO is anything but clear! Go around the room of most C-suites inquiring as to the nature of the CIO role and you are likely to get as many different responses as there are people around the table.
The source of all this attention can probably be anchored in the perennial problems that most organizations experience with their technology investments and the questionable return boards and leadership teams believe they are achieving from their, usually, not insignificant spend.2 Generally, it is the CIO who is held responsible for any disappointments to do with technology. The current “digital transformation” push of many organizations has again propelled the CIO into the spotlight. The pace of technological change means that chief executive officers (CEOs) are typically looking to their CIO to make the connection between technology and the business mission and drive the digital agenda. Yet, all the evidence suggests that organizations are struggling to achieve their digital ambitions.3
Perhaps as a consequence, CIOs have been reported as having a shorter tenure compared to other CxO roles.4 While some CIOs may not be a good fit for the requirements of their role, a central factor contributing to an organization’s lack of success from IT is often the confusion about what a CIO is expected to achieve and the gap between expectations assigned for the role and the realities of what is possible within the constraints imposed by the leadership team. This latter situation was summed up by one CIO who said to us that, among other things, he was also expected to walk on water! This confusion has only exacerbated with the emergence of the chief digital officer (CDO), where job specs for this position seem to encroach on what many would consider as falling into the remit of a CIO.
This ambiguity around the role has implications for anyone taking up a CIO job. One thing is certain though: it can lead to significant frustration, not just for the CIO but also for the rest of the C-suite. Understanding the origins of the CIO position can help in understanding where this ambiguity has come from and point to how its impact might be eliminated. Indeed, we have found that there are actually different types of CIO, shaped by the scope of the role and strategic and operational choices that are made for the incumbent. This points to the fact that there may not be a single role descriptor. For any CIO taking up an assignment, it is important to consider this as it can impact both performance in the role as they shape expectations and how the incumbent is ultimately assessed and, more importantly, what they can achieve.
The Evolution of the CIO Role
To begin to understand the ambiguity surrounding the CIO role, it is helpful to trace its origins and examine at how it has evolved since it first arrived in organizations. Like many C-suite roles, the CIO role has changed over the years. However, unlike other roles, the role today is unrecognizable from early incarnations. Perhaps no C-level position has undergone as many changes in expectations, approaches and philosophies during the past few decades as that of the CIO. And the turbulent forces shaping businesses in today’s always-on, connected and global marketplace promise to accelerate this ongoing evolution.
William Synott is generally credited with coining the label “Chief Information Officer” at the 1980 Information Management Exposition and Conference. In his speech, Synott introduced this new role describing it as responsible for overseeing an organization’s information systems. He predicted that “[t]he manager of information systems in the 1980s has to be Superhuman—retaining his technology cape, but doffing the technical suit for a business suit and becoming one of the chief executives of the firm. The job of chief information officer (CIO)—equal in rank to chief executive and chief financial officer—does not exist today, but the CIO will identify, collect and manage information as a resource, set corporate information policy and affect all office and distributed systems.” Although it did take a number of years to catch on, the role was given broad recognition in 1986 when popular business magazine BusinessWeek, a perennial barometer of US board room thinking, ran a story announcing the arrival of the CIO. This it did under the banner “Management’s newest star: meet the chief information officer”.5
The genesis of the CIO role can be traced to a shift from IT having a supporting role in organizations, automating previously manual back-office tasks, such as payroll, accounting and inventory management to being a source of innovation and competitive advantage, driving strategic change. This shift demanded considerably more than just a focus on specifying, deploying and operating IT, which was the role of the CIO’s predecessors: computer managers, data processing managers, eDP managers6 and IT Directors. The new role required business-driven approaches to exploiting information and the capabilities of technology. Increasingly, information was recognized—at least in some quarters—as a critical resource that required active management, stewardship and oversight from a senior management perspective.7 Even Michael Porter, the doyen of strategy, got in on the act when he postulated how information could give organizations a competitive advantage.8
The newly created position of CIO emphasized information over technology, enterprise over function and strategy over operations. Incumbents were still responsible for technology, in so far as it provided a capability, but the role had expanded. In addition to the operational dimensions, the position had a key requirement to provoke executive-level discussions across the organization relating to how information and technology could be leveraged, particularly in the pursuit of competitive advantage.
Prior to the 1980s, the role could be described as a back-office, functional one. The precursor to the CIO was head of an organizational unit, responsible for delivering IT services and applications and maintaining the necessary computing infrastructure. As essentially a technical role, IT was seen as subservient to the business, and the job of the “CIO” reflected this. There were, of course, a few organizations that saw the potential for technology to be a source of competitive advantage and the CIOs of these organizations played a more strategic role. Companies such as Frito Lay, Otis Elevators, Baxter Healthcare, American Airlines, Fedex, Walmart and BP were among a small number that harnessed IT as a source of competitive differentiation.9
It was really only with the arrival of PCs in the 1980s that computers become affordable to even the smallest organization and became more mainstream. Supporting knowledge workers, office automation (OA) became an objective that accelerated when networking capabilities were available toward the end of that decade. In most cases, however, this new office technology merely replaced traditional paper-based applications: typing (i.e. word processing), financial calculations and modeling (i.e. spreadsheets), record keeping (i.e. data bases); and with the arrival of networking technologies, internal memos (i.e. email). Despite the increasing profile of IT, the CIO role was still seen primarily as a technical one.
If BusinessWeek announced the arrival of the CIO, it also speculated its demise. In response to the challenges that companies were facing with their technology investments at the time—a situation that still prevails to this day—it ran another story on the CIO role at the end of the decade. This time, it suggested that for many incumbents taking on the poisoned chalice of CIO often meant “Career Is Over”.10
In the early 1990s, business process reengineering (BPR) raised the profile of technology and, in some organizations, the status of the CIO. This was also the beginnings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementations that are still with us today. Organizations were strongly advised not to “pave the cow path” when deploying technology but rather to look to the opportunities that technology provided to re-imagine processes and workflows.11 While essentially an operational and efficiency play, because technology was relatively new at seeking this scale of integration at an enterprise level, companies could gain a competitive advantage by successfully rolling out technology.
However, companies had mixed results with their investments.12 The failure of many reengineering initiatives was usually not because the technology didn’t work (although there were, and still are, examples of this) but primarily due to the failure to successfully manage the associated organizational change.13 As was noted by one commentator at the time, it was the “fad that forgot people”,14 a nod to the continual challenge that organizations have with their technology investments.
The CIO role gained added exposure from the mid-1990s with the internet opening up for commercial activity. Companies rushed to establish an online presence and build e-commerce channels, looking to their CIO to source and build the necessary technology. With new technologies, “knowledge management” entered the fray. This also coincided with efforts to address the year 2000 problem (Y2K), the so called millennium bug. That no major catastrophe resulted from the switch-over to the new millennium was due to the planning and execution of CIOs, although for some in C-suite, the CIO was seen as perhaps overplaying his/her hand. The role lost its luster a bit with the dotcom bust a few short years later. Indeed, the situation at the time led the ever-influential Harvard Business Review to run a contributed article titled “Are CIOs obsolete?”15
It was also at this juncture that IT outsourcing reached fever pitch. Ever since Kodak outsourced their IT systems in 1989, the first time a large global corporation had done so, it become a popular strategy.16 For many organizations, IT was not seen by their leadership team as core to their main business and an obvious candidate to have performed by someone else. It had an added bonus of ridding the organization of what was perceived as a “problem”. Over the years, outsourcing has tended to ebb and flow with business cycles: in down turns it is usually seen as an attractive proposition. But as we have seen in recent years, this has led to some companies, particularly in automotive, retail and energy industries, now grappling to rebuild this capability that is now core to competing in the digital economy.
The nail in the coffin for the CIO came in the form of Nicholas Carr’s 2003 article “IT doesn’t matter”, published in the Harvard Business Review.17 This article reinforced many of the prejudices that executives often hold in relation to technology. Carr argued that investment in IT, while profoundly important, is less and less likely to deliver a competitive edge to an individual company. “No one wou...