A Wake-Up Call For CIOs

If you're not doing your job as CIO, lots of people are suggesting that somebody else should be. Haven't you noticed this burgeoning trend calling for chief-something-officers to handle responsibilities that rightfully fall under your purview? Chief digital officer. Chief data officer. Chief mobility officer. Chief security officer.

This drumbeat isn’t new – CSO magazine has been around for years and Gartner trumpeted its prediction – that by 2015, 20% of U.S. organizations will have a chief digital officer – at its conference just about a year ago.

But it's getting louder. I'm happy to say that when I researched the topic of whether companies needed a chief mobility officer for Computerworld earlier this year, I found so few examples of CMOs that the term only showed up twice in the story. But even so, the suggestion keeps popping up, like a perpetual whack-a-mole game.

Recruiting firm DHR released a white paper last month on the emergence of the Chief Data Officer. The executive summary read in part, "While these executives will surely partner with the CDO, most CIOs and CTOs do not possess the knowledge and experience to guide a big data program, and most do not have the bandwidth to cultivate and champion a data-driven culture."

Excuse me? CIOs do not possess knowledge and experience about data? Who do these people think have been in charge of the data up until now? Who’s been running the databases, the data warehouses, the business intelligence initiatives?

Last year, Gartner analyst David Willis made the same kind of accusation against CIOs, promulgating the idea of the Chief Digital Officer by saying the position "plays … where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated and the mission accomplished. … That’s a long way from running back office IT."

That’s like saying Steven Spielberg should be kept out of the director’s chair because he doesn't know anything about new trends in filmmaking.

The topic came up again last week when SAS executive Anne Buff spoke at a conference sponsored by Information Management, and said that companies needed a chief data officer "to save CIOs from burnout [because] there is stuff falling off their plates.'

This is where the difference between what they mean and what they say kicks in. And this is where CIOs – if they hear this in their own organizations – need to start paying attention. If you can’t handle the core capabilities of your job, somebody’s going to suggest slicing off pieces of it. (If it's vendors making the suggestion, it's probably because you don't return their phone calls, and they want to deal with someone who will.)

What's completely heretical about this drumbeat is that you never hear of anyone suggesting that we start carving pieces out of CEOs’ responsibilities because they’re too complex. And they're in charge of everything. But they have other executives – CFOs, COOs, and yes, CIOs – to help them manage. That's where these CDO/CMO jobs should go – under the purview of the CIOs, to help them manage the all-important aspects of technology.

I'm with Thornton May, executive director of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College and my favorite prognosticator on the state of the CIO position. He wrote in Computerworld earlier this month, "Subscription research firms in our industry insist that the role of the CIO is in decline and will soon be relegated to the dust heap of history. This is patently absurd. Think about it. We are on the cusp of a digital renaissance. Yet the CIO will have no role to play in the new era that is dawning?"

He continued, "The vast majority of CIOs are amazing. They understand the business better than just about anyone else. They have mad relationship skills and actually care about their people. They are wicked smart and scary funny. I am so tired of academics, consultants and vendors beating the 'they only speak geek' drum. The empirical evidence does not support this misconception."

That said, CIOs must take action. Just as CEOs must manage multiple, dissimilar facets of business, you must expand your purview to understand both technology and business – how each relates to the other. To gain the trust of your peers, start with a small but highly visible problem, solve it, and then ask, what’s next?

Only then will people stop saying we need more Chiefs, and start assigning you more Indians.

Email CIO Next Community Manager Howard Baldwin about your "chief" concerns, or about anything you’d like to see in CIO Next.