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Why So Many CIOs Are Ineffective – and What to Do about It
In his recent CIO Dive opinion post, Why So Many CIOs Are Ineffective – and What to Do about It PwC Partner, Advisory Services Mike McCarron asked, “Why, after CIOs have existed for so many decades, do we still struggle to legitimize the function as a true player in the C-suite”?
Mike provides the answer, “It’s primarily because we haven’t done enough to establish ourselves as strategic business leaders first and technology leaders second. Every other person at the C-suite table is a business leader first, followed by whatever function they happen to lead.”
“If you’re a CIO, you must be a strategic business leader while leading a service organization. You must understand that you are there to make the CEO, the CFO, and everybody else in the C-suite more successful and to make the business fundamentally better, whatever that means for that business.”
“It’s up to you to bring ideas to the table to drive additional sales, improve customer intimacy, build a better product, etc. …CIOs need to be able to have a conversation with CEOs and CFOs about how they’re going to make them and the company more effective – without using a lot of tech jargon. And then they have to execute on those promises.”
Mike’s perspective is reflected by a couple of articles also published in 2022 by well-known business media…
In the CIO article, CIOs Make the Leap to Business Leadership, contributing writer Esther Shein cites Gartner Vice President Analyst Christie Struckman on a 2019 study of CIOs who transition to other C-Suite positions.
“It’s not enough to just have business acumen, you also need business centricity. CIOs/CTOs learn how to manage complexity because of their environment, but they need to be able to link strategy to execution.”
Some of the CIOs, interviewed for the Gartner study and who have made the transition, said their advice is to “use IT as the business within a business. And to not shy away from the financials, while spending time with procurement and sourcing because that’s part of understanding the business.”
Esther also quotes the 2022 State of CIO report that “84% of heads of IT characterize the CIO as a changemaker who increasingly leads business and technology initiatives. Seventy-six percent of their business counterparts agree, and 58% of lines of business respondents describe their CIO as a strategic advisor, up from 28% in 2021.”
Here’s an article that, in addition, describes why the growth in CIOs becoming strategic advisors occurred so quickly…
In her recent Raconteur piece, Why CIOs are the new strategic business leaders, Christine Horton explains that “because CIOs drove the urgent shift to digital platforms and services during the pandemic, they are becoming better positioned to fulfill a role as a strategic advisor to their organizations.”
She reports that business is recognizing the growing importance of CIOs. “Companies are increasingly seeing their IT chiefs as high-level business advisers….Recent CIO.com research indicates that, within three years, more than half of corporate tech chiefs will focus less on overseeing functional work and more on developing strategies for the whole business.”
Christine quotes Omid Shiraji, a consultant CIO, who says, “A CIO must focus on outcomes and their value to the business. They must be able to talk the right kind of language to different people with different perspectives. That’s really different from what the CIO role has traditionally been.”
To keep pace, savvy CIOs must take immediate action.
Position Yourself to Become a Strategic Business Leader
As outlined in the highlighted articles above, CIOs must establish themselves as a strategic business leader. To do so, they must acquire appropriate knowledge and skills, as well as specific and actionable guidance on how to apply these within their organization. Here are the ones mentioned above:
- Learn how to have effective and productive communications with other C-suite colleagues
- Be better able to link strategy to execution
- Focus on the outcomes and their value to the business
Cutting-edge professional development is a targeted way for CIOs to upskill and become a more strategic business leader…
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