Could you be a CIO?

Nothing illustrates the role of information in modern business better than the emergence of the CIO or Chief Information Officer. It's a senior management position that first appeared in the late 1980s. In theory at least, the role combines information technology know-how with all-round business skills.

It may a simplistic and clichéd view, but the cartoon CIO should be able to read a circuit diagram, debug programming code, find out where the bodies are buried in a set of corporate accounts and understand the general thrust of a opaquely-written marketing plan.

Being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and stop a locomotive in its tracks don't appear in any job description I've seen so far but they'd probably help.

CIO Magazine offers this mission statement prepared by the Gartner Group :

To provide technology vision and leadership for developing and implementing IT initiatives that create and maintain leadership for the enterprise in a constantly changing and intensely competitive marketplace.

It's really not a bad stab at defining the role, but the words could apply to the bespectacled kid hacking away at Linux in the back room of an ice cream parlour.

In fact, Gartner's mission statement could apply to just about anyone working in information technology with a mere smidgeon of ambition. And it is London to a brick most enterprises in this quadrant of the galaxy regard their marketplace as constantly changing or intensely competitive.

Leadership and vision

On the other hand, I'm impressed Gartner managed to squeeze in the concepts of leadership and vision. To me these are certainly the important features that distinguish a good CIO from the dross. Of course, leadership and vision is not about being the first company to sign up to a new initiative being pushed by one of the big technology vendors. Sometimes it involves standing up to the snake oil merchants.

Likewise, CIO leadership and vision isn't about blowing the budget on expensive new toys. Though some technology vendors use the words to imply exactly that. In their view visionaries spend money on their products regardless of whether they are proven or not.

And leadership most definitely is not about ploughing into heroic IT. The era of huge, unworkable mega-projects came to an end about the time the first CIOs appeared.

These days most companies recognise that information technology is a tool that will implement the business plan. It's part of the CIOs job to ensure that IT and related knowledge resources are harnessed towards the key business objectives and do not become an end in themselves.

Pinnacle of knowledge work

In many respects a CIO position in a large corporation can be regarded as one of the pinnacles of knowledge-workerdom. It's not necessarily the top knowledge worker job even for those knowledge workers with an IT background, indeed some CIOs have progressed to the CEO position, but the specialist nature of CIO work means such a transition is unusual even in those companies where the strategic application of technology and information tools lies at the very core of the business.

While some CIOs climbed to their position from technical careers in programming, systems analysis or even support, you don't need to have an intensely technical background to reach this exalted position. That's because in many case a CIO is more involved in applying technology in order to help an organisation reach is business goals than actually managing the technology on a day-to-day basis. That is why some people stepping into the CIO position and similar senior IT-related roles come from a user or application background.

Management education

If you do have a mainly technical background and you hope to step into a CIO role at some point, you'd be better off looking at expanding your management education rather than your technical skills. Obviously an MBA will help more than Microsoft certification or any further IT qualifications. You'll need a strong business orientation and some in depth experience working on commercial applications in a key industry sector.

It's possible you arrived in IT management with a first degree in a non-technical or non-vocational subject. Some recruiters might advise you to top up your technical education before shooting for an MBA as a stepping-stone to the CIO role. In my opinion, it makes more sense to gather technical expertise on the job and concentrate your formal education resources on that MBA. Having some major project success on your CV is more likely to impress potential employers than any formal IT qualification. Remember, CIO is more about strategy than hands on computing.

Not all top-ranked corporate IT professionals are CIOs. There is generally a clear distinction between the role of Director of IT and CIO. The former is mainly involved with implementing strategies on behalf of senior management. It's perfectly normal for a Director of IT to provide advice and input at the senior management level, but the job is primarily technical. On the other hand, the CIO role is more strategic. In some organisations the Director of IT reports to the CIO.

The rewards for successful CIOs can be enormous. Of course it does depend on the size of an organisation and the magnitude of the job. There are CIOs working in Australia with salaries well in excess of A$500,000. More often CIO positions involve more modest salary packages along with generous performance bonuses - sometimes, but not always, in the form of stock options.