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In the days of yore, CIOs used to be the kings – and rarely queens, since there were few women in the profession – of their own little domains. Of course, in those ancient days they were called Data Processing (DP) Managers or IS or IT managers or directors, and their kingdoms consisted of the back office.
Ever six months or so the IT director would be summoned in to see his boss – likely the CFO – to explain what he was doing and why he needed so much money to do it. Since the CIO usually spoke techno babble, the CFO usually hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. There was some suspicion at the time that the people who worked in the back office supervising cargo container-sized mainframes were aliens.
Then, someone came up with the title chief information officer (CIO). (I have done searches on both Google and Bing in attempt to find out who authored this term with no luck.) At more or less the same time, the mission of the CIO began to expand in accordance with the mantra about aligning IT with business. Meanwhile, corporations began tearing down so-called silos, the vertical structure under which they’d long been operating gave way to an enterprise wide, holistic approach
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Ever since, the CIO’s portfolio has been expanding exponentially. Today, the CIO is typically working directly with everyone from business line heads to risk managers, legal, HR and the finance people. Indeed, senior IT executives must be familiar enough with marketing , for example, to help select, implement and manage the CRM solution best suited for the company’s marketing arm. The same goes for providing IT support for sales. And should the marketing people decide to use Twitter, Facebook or social networking approach to generate some marketing buzz, the CIO needs to bone up quickly on these tools. How do they impact security? Is there some way the company can use Facebook to leverage resources? The CIO is likely the point person on these complicated questions.
Or, say, manufacturing decides to adopt of cloud computing services in a supply chain context. This isn’t a theoretical, but something that’s occurring now. Who within the C-suite is going to have to assess the impact of Cloud Computing on corporate security and risk, understand the differential among vendors and oversee an implement strategy. That will likely be a joint effort that may include the CSO, the head of manufacturing or supply chain, purchasing and the number crunchers, but you can bet the CIO will be at the center of it.
Probably no collaboration today, however, is more important than that of the CIO and the CFO. With budgets being pruned on a sometimes monthly basis, the CIO in effect has to act as the CFO of his or her own department, weighing financial trade offs and which investments are going to generate the most immediate ROIs. He has to be in lock step with the financial side of the organization
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Today, the CIO needs to be plugged into the entire enterprise and have communications lines open throughout. IT is no longer a solo act, not that it ever really was. Conversely, the various business units have to understand IT’s functions and it’s limitations. If you’re going to take the time and make the effort to grasp what your compliance department needs in terms of data transparency and database access, the compliance crowd has to grasp a fundamental understanding of IT’s role throughout the enterprise.
Meanwhile, the purchase of that new compliance software, that CRM system upgrade or those new ERP modules must be weighed against the needs of every other department within the company. The business units have to appreciate that. Today’s CIO already does.
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