Tomorrow’s CIO looking very much like today’s CEO, research finds
Recent research finds emerging challenges abound for tomorrow's CIO: mastering business processes, creating customer value and experience outside of IT.
The study, “Tomorrow’s CIO,” released by InformationWeek, revealed that companies continue to demand business innovation and technology vision from CIOs while looking to CIOs for leadership across a broad range of issues. The in-depth study delved into the role of the CIO and their evolving influence within their organizations.
The study found that companies would continue to expect more than infrastructure management from CIOs and their IT organizations. The attributes considered extremely important by at least eight of 10 people surveyed are leadership, effective execution, collaboration, vision, innovation, and team building.
In the survey of 720 business technology executives, 78% believe that the need to optimize business processes will drive the CIO’s influence as a leader.
Moreover, the study revealed warning signs for CIOs. Only 39% of corporate managers outside IT say the influence of the CIO is increasing, down from 43% in Information Week’s research a year ago. CIOs are slightly more bullish on themselves: 55% say the CIO’s stature has increased in their organization, down from 66% a year ago. One third of the corporate managers surveyed describe the CIO as “actively involved” in the big corporate decisions, the same as last year. But only 30% of CIOs describe themselves as “actively involved,” down from 38% last year.
The research points to even greater changes for the CIOs waiting in the wings. New and future generations of CIOs will need a different skill set to master the CIO role of tomorrow. Experience other than IT is increasingly more critical to the CIO of tomorrow. Expectations are high for tomorrow’s CIO—a tech-savvy business leader and innovator, aggressive and effective, visionary and practical, innovative and process orientated.
The report also cited the major obstacles confronting CIOs and topping the list is the view of IT as a cost center rather than business enabler. “There’s a dichotomy developing around the perception of the CIO. Where some organizations see a competitive advantage in their IT organizations, others suffer from the legacy perception that IT is a cost to be minimized,” said Art Wittmann, Managing Director of InformationWeek Analytics. “Increasingly it’s up to the CIO to prove the worth of IT investments.”
