Is the Chief Information Officer Obsolete?

When electricity became available, corporations had vice presidents of electricity. When the automobile became popular, corporations created vice presidents of automobiles.

In fact, every time a new technological innovation emerged with the capacity to dramatically impact the way business was conducted, enterprises responded by establishing a silo through which the new benefit could be evaluated and institutionalized.

Information has been around for a long, long time. Technology less so, but their twaining is hardly breaking news. Given the universal influence that technology has on the way in which organizations are structured, incentivized and led, it is, therefore, worth questioning why even our most bleeding edge companies continue to provide a separate silo for technology and information.

It is possible to imagine creating a cadre of knowledgeable savants who are tasked with evaluating the state of products and services, anticipating future developments and using that knowledge to plan the optimal strategy for the organization' information technology interface. Too often however, it seems that those in the CIO function are more concerned with cost, control and centralization than with the numerous benefits of experimentation that can then be spread throughout the organization.

In an environment in which technology AND information have become so central to any institution's successful functioning as well as to its achievement of even the most modest outcomes, it would seem that encouraging the broadest level of expertise and experimentation across the enterprise to assure the broadest possible access and utility of whatever devices in whatever configuration for whatever purpose would be the optimal goal. JL

Dean Fischer and Eric Dean comment in Venture Beat:

Relegating all things IT to the CIO perpetuates the belief that technological literacy is an exclusive realm, rather than one the executive team or entire business should occupy.
On what seems like a weekly basis, we see new technologies – from wearables to eye-tracking smartphones – emerge and promise to wedge their way into business environments. Unfortunately, most firms will struggle to build on and benefit from these IT innovations.
The presence of a CIO might be to blame.
In a troubling number of organizations, the CIO is left to oversee the majority of decisions pertaining to IT, while the rest of the executive team gets a free pass on their technological incompetence. As technology becomes the epicenter of almost all business functions, technophobic C-suites are stifling their companies’ potential.
We’ve seen that the sheer presence of a CIO often enables the rest of the C-suite’s tech ignorance. When corporate hierarchy defines a role under which IT decisions can be siloed, executives are prone to deflect even the simplest technology decisions to that silo, or worse, make their own decisions separate from the rest of the company. Relegating all things IT to the CIO perpetuates the belief that technological literacy is an exclusive realm, rather than one the executive team or entire business should occupy.
Much of the modern executive tech knowledge gap can be attributed to historical perceptions of IT as a highly specialized field unfathomable to all but a select few. As we’ve seen with mobile devices and SaaS applications, consumers and end users are driving technology change in the workplace today – not just IT specialists.
In spite of these systemic issues, it’s probably not time to bid your CIO farewell yet. The CIO’s role is safe, given that few executive counterparts currently possess the skillset required to independently make sound IT decisions, and fewer organizations foster the cross-departmental collaboration needed to take advantage of new technology. Similarly, many organizations still run on complex legacy IT systems, and expertise in maintaining and securing old yet critical code is scarce. Nevertheless, we feel the long-term outlook for the CIO’s role is bleak.
Firms can’t wait for their executive IT deficiencies to correct themselves; they need a smarter approach to executive hiring, including efforts to screen for technological competence. We’ve seen businesses recruit solely based on years of experience or industry connections. Instead, organizations should broaden their criteria to include younger candidates who have spent most of their lives around technology. In order to build a C-suite full of confident IT leaders, companies should invest in individuals who already possess a natural affinity for technology in their personal and professional lives.
Even in organizations that bench the CIO from the C-team, executives won’t be left floundering. Cloud computing’s rise has empowered managed service providers to take on some of CIOs’ more intricate responsibilities, such as overseeing delicate legacy infrastructure. As outsourced and cloud-based services replace in-house environments, we believe many of the CIO’s daily tasks will evaporate. In time, the combined powers of a tech-inclined C-suite and network of managed service providers could endanger the CIO role for good. Given advances in application development cycles, large companies can adopt almost a startup’s approach to IT, delegating initiatives to small teams at a lesser cost.
CIOs still hold a valuable spot in most organizations, but businesses would be wise to start planning their approach toward building an IT-capable executive team. This should include a refreshed HR mindset, one that prioritizes technological literacy during executive recruitment, and a culture that discourages overreliance on the CIO. There are plenty of risks in this transition, including overly compartmentalized solutions and the building of mini-IT empires. A management team that’s as tech smart as it is business savvy, however, can successfully manage those risks.