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How many CIOs do you know that make as much as, say, their company’s COO
or CFO. For that matter how many IT chiefs do you know who sit on their company’s board of directors.
.
You can pretty much do the math on one hand.
Now a few years ago when chief information’s officer’s responsibilities consisted
almost entirely of running the IT shop efficiently, it was difficult -- ok, impossible --
to make the case that they belonged in the top managerial tier in terms of salary.
or deserved a prime seat at the executive room conference table.
That was then. Today CIOs’ responsibilities have grown significantly. To wit:
Today CIOs are in charge of managing vital outsourcing operations. We’re not talking
here about supervising some offshore supplier that is performing basic processing
and transaction tasks in Mumbai. Or running a help desk in Bangalore. Today mission critical apps and critical core functions are being carried out by a third party supplier offshore.
Now, you might argue that in farming out IT infrastructure and the like the CIO’s job
become easier. Not so, the CIO must take the lead in choosing the supplier, negotiating the deal and supervising the work on an ongoing basis. The outsourcing buck stops at the CIOs office, but now the dollars amounts at stake can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
One other note here: The outsourced portfolio that the CIO needs to oversee continues
to grow with BPO recently being added to the mix. Traditionally, BPO was initiated and managed by business heads and kept separate
from IT. No longer.
Not only is the CIO generally in charge of dealing with and supervising ITO,
but now he is also in the driver’s seat when it comes to multi-sourcing
and using third party suppliers for cloud computing, vitualization and the like.
And if the cloud vendor loses key corporate data, guess who is going the be
called into the principal’s office.
The CIO arguably has a better in-depth view of every phase of the corporate operations
than any other top executive because IT is enterprise wide. It touches everything,
and the CIO has the tools, or should have, -- see analytics and BI – to A) grasp the
big picture and B) to act immediately on any change or trend that needs addressing.
OK, he provides the CEO and, or the CFO with these same tools, but he’s got to be the
expert here.
In the top-down days of yesterday, the CIO ran his little fiefdom as a silo. Now, though,
collaboration is becoming increasingly common with the CIO at the center of the
collaborate efforts. The good CIO now not only needs to work hand in glove with the
CEO and CFO, but he must work closely with risk, compliance and governance
managers; the CSO as IT security becomes holistic; marketing as it gloms on to social media to reach out to new customers and the business unot heads and responsibility for BPO shifts.
Finally, today’s CIO has to be informed about everything from new security threats to
legal concerns regarding to social media use to SEC rulings on data privacy. This is in
addition to tracking technology trends, vendor developments, new cost cutting
trends and the usual bag of tricks
.
This said, I respectfully submit that the CIO is currently one of the top three
or four players on the senior executive team and should be accorded the
appropriate R-E-S-P-C-T and a paycheck to match.
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