Reviving the "I" in CIO
Greetings! I'm the executive editor at Computerworld, where we cover enterprise IT for managers such as corporate CIOs. I like the title of this blog, because I've always been a bit disappointed that the title Chief Information Officer has come to mean "top technology executive" instead of "top information executive." The CIO title actually evolved in the mid-1980s from the public-sector notion of "information resources management," which held that information (in whatever form) is a resource that needs to be managed. However, through the 1990s, the CIO was more T than I.
But that may be changing. Consider the following megatrends:
* Outsourcing and hosted software applications mean there's less technology in the corporate IT shop.
* CEOs want CIOs to exploit business intelligence systems for competitive advantage, innovation and business agility.
* Those business intelligence systems require careful attention to data quality, because dirty data yields bad decisions.
* CIOs are playing a role in regulatory compliance such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires better information management.
* CEOs want CIOs to help tame information overload so they can get better productivity from managers and knowledge workers.
* CIOs should be involved in records management, especially now that it's routine for companies to get hauled into court and have to produce all of their memos and e-mail.
* Privacy, security and intellectual-property protection (all information issues) are hot corporate priorities.
In most cases, those megatrends deal more with information management than with technology management. So my guess (hope?) is that the CIO job -- which today is probably 80% T and 20% I -- will see a reversal in that ratio.
Given the power of these megatrends, maybe in five years CIOs will really live up to their middle name.
Mitch Betts
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/betts