What is a CIO? - CXOTalk

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is evolving rapidly? What is a CIO and how should a CIO allocate time, resources, budget, and investment planning to be most effective?
One of the most world's most prominent CIO influencers shares his advice.
In this discussion, we explore the following topics:
-- What is a Chief Information Officer (CIO)?
-- Characteristics of innovative CIO
-- What challenges does CIO face?
-- Organizational politics and the CIO
-- CIO investment and innovation
-- Future of the CIO role in 2021 and beyond
Peter High is an expert in business and information technology strategy and a trusted advisor to a wide array of business and tech executives ranging across Fortune 500 companies in various industries.
He is author of the upcoming book Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company Into a Digital Leader, which will be released in March. Featuring insights from executives at Capital One, Domino's Pizza, The Washington Post, FedEx and other leading firms, the book offers a framework and best practices companies can use to transform their people practices, processes, technologies, ecosystems, and strategies for the digital era.
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From the conversation:
Characteristics of innovative CIOs
Michael Krigsman: Peter, what you just described, sure, it's the CIO, but is that person a technologist? Are they a business person? Should we even be making this distinction?
Peter High: That's a really good question and one that's been up for debate for a long time in various forms. Should a CIO? Is it necessary for him or her to be an engineer by background, to have grown up in a technology field in some way to understand the inner workings of it, given its complexity?
I will not necessarily side on one way or the other, definitively, as I've seen people without technical backgrounds be some of the best CIOs. They oftentimes will need a CTO or a partner in crime who does understand the technical details at a level that perhaps they don't.
I think the best-case scenario is, you have somebody who does understand the technology, who understands the ones and zeros of what the company, what the department is working with. But also, has the business acumen to be able to understand how is a business created in this company; how do we impact (as I mentioned before) the topline and the bottom line, especially in public organizations where that's so important and will be tracked by Wall Street on a regular basis to gauge success or lack thereof?
This becomes, I think, increasingly an important part of what CIOs need to do. As a result, having that broader perspective becomes so important.
If I can just share a quick story relative to that, Michael - Vanguard. Vanguard is the largest mutual fund company; one of the largest financial services organizations, as a result of that, based in Malvern, Pennsylvania - just outside of Philadelphia.
Their CIO, another one of the greats (to my mind)-John Marcante is his name-he's been with the company, after a period at GE, for a couple of decades now at Vanguard. His pathway is not so dissimilar from others within Vanguard.
He joined in IT and, as he was viewed as a high potential and his career started to take off, they began to give him assignments outside of IT. What did this do? This leavened his experience with a greater and deeper understanding as to how value is created. Why do customers pay us anything and how does that go up? How do we think about the development of new products?
He ended up running a different business. He has his own profit and loss statement, a P&L, within one of the businesses at Vanguard before coming back to become the chief information officer. I should also mention, by the way, Tim Buckley, the chief executive officer of the company, is himself a former chief information officer of the organization.
This is a general point beyond the IT department. Those companies that think of themselves as talent factories where they provide people a figurative semester abroad, year abroad, or maybe it's multiple years abroad-I say that figuratively. In some cases, it could be literally if it's an international part of your business-certainly, adjacent areas, giving them experiences in other business units or divisions of the company such that when they ascend, perhaps into the original division they were a part of, they do so with a richness and a fuller understanding, as I say, how value is created and, therefore, have a better appreciation as to how they and (by extension, of course) their teams can impact that.

[@firasajeel968]

It's powerful and sufficient info to explain the C-LEVEL job & role in market.

[@vasanthiganesan4076]

Awesome

[@sams7945]

Great conversation & insights...

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[@newyorkmathan]

I would say the best talk I watched in recent times while prepping for the CIO journey. Peter shared multiple ways thru which CIOs can add value to revenue, culture and to improve the overall customer experience. This was enough to convince me to order "Getting to Nimble'. I will now be watching CXO Talk along with Metis strategy!

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