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I have written from time to time on the human side of being a CIO and considered the value of the title of the senior IT worker in a company, and have decided to make a summary; some things don’t change.
I have come to the conclusion that a CIO needs to be able to make people, money and technology work effectively, and I am also of the view that individuals that can do all three are exceedingly scarce. Sadly I have no science nor survey data to back up the proposed skills conflicts but I do have many years of observation.
As IT complexity has grown, senior management has required more skills and the management portfolio has moved from the CFO to a peer director level appointment, initially, in the UK, IT or IS directors, but latterly, our US colleagues desire for alphabetic symmetry has led to them being called a CIO. This transition [of skills] has been healthy as the fetishising of measurable positive ROI is diminished.
This might be seen as controversial, but in my article “ Influences on Economics” [or on Medium], I wrote,
“my thinking about this started in the early 1990’s, Dan Remenyi at Henley Management School introduced me to the ideas that Information was the 4th Factor of Production, that industrial age economics was insufficient as it was unable to explain why companies that invested in negative or zero profit IT…
