The value of a CIO

I recently attended the CIO Council summit in Sydney and was inspired by great speakers presenting on leadership, innovation, culture and many other topics. The networking conversations eventually turn to what makes a good CIO. We all know that a good CIO can strip costs from a business through effective contract management. Saving 5% to 10% from a telecommunications provider is where this starts. Aligning contracts with a common end-date is another good strategy to managing the environment. But it goes further than that. Much further.

What value does a CIO bring? Is there a hint in the title? CIO?

Chief Information Officer

What Information is there in a business? How is this useful? How is information used? Is the role about managing information? Surely there must be more. Pundits have joked an alternative for the CIO acronym:

Career Is Over

Maybe there is some truth in this. If we can’t agree on the value that a CIO adds then how can we measure success? What should CEOs and other executives expect from a CIO?

I propose there is an alternative:

Chief Innovation Officer

Whilst I might not be the first, there is a compelling argument to adopt this.

Of course there is a hierarchy of delivery the CIO must manage. The technical, plumbing components must work and must work reliably. Many are outsourcing their ‘blinking lights’ to cloud providers to make the daily grind of infrastructure go away, so not to be distracted by email and server access. Whilst not a pre-requisite, you can’t focus on innovation until the CEO can reliably get email on their phone.

Above all, I ask, who else in the organisation is better placed to introduce innovation?

I propose that the CIO is best placed to do this. To understand the business, to be the business, to assume the role of every other executive and understand their drivers, their pain points, their opportunities and their ambitions.

The CIO understands the technology, has the relationship with the CEO, peer executives and understands the business landscape to deliver innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.

Some of the ways a CIO delivers is by reducing complexity, optimising and eliminating processes, developing value with customers (new products, new ways of interacting), delivering new ways to measure internal productivity.

This is the measure of a CIO. The level of innovation delivered. Nothing else matters.