CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ

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Wow. Can the CIO escape the chief infrastructure officer corner? Or, has that ship sailed?

“New research suggests chief executives don’t consider CIOs of their companies as partners in managing either strategy or innovation. This data could go a long way towards explaining why so many CIO jobs are advertised as strategic, but end up being largely operational.

According to Gartner, which conducts an annual survey of CEO attitudes towards technology, only 4% of the chief executives of some of the world’s largest companies consider their CIOs as leaders of innovation management within their organizations, or as supporting them in making strategic changes to the business.

Mark Raskino, who conducted the survey, added that 35% of CEOs named the CFO as their main strategic partner in the company, but didn’t mention CFOs at all when it comes to managing innovation either. “In this world of digital disruption, this overall equation is almost a systemic map for creating a blind spot… Strategy and innovation are held separately, and the CIO is held nowhere near any of them,” he told CIO Journal.”

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“It reflects the extent to which CIOs are under-appreciated by the rest of the executive suite, in large part because “too often, IT leaders see themselves, and CEOs see them, as custodians of the tools” used to drive innovation. High says CIOs can change this perception by leading conversations about how IT can support initiatives for human resources, legal and compliance and marketing departments.

Gartner surveyed 381 companies for this report, 16% of which generate revenues of $50 billion or more, 23% of which earn between $5 billion and $25 billion, and 36% of which earn between $1 billion and $5 billion. Seventy percent of respondents were CEOs, president or board members, and 30% were CFOs. More than half employed more than 10,000 workers.“

via CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ.

Another article on the survey result points to short CIO tenures as a detriment:

“CIOs are seen as employees that move from company to company, never rising to a more senior role and never staying longer than their next job offer, added Lopez.“

Regardless of the cause, the impact is significant. I’m not advocating that the “I” in CIO becomes “Innovation”, but in the now (and forever) digital business world, the CIO needs to press the innovation agenda. Directly, or via a strategic hire.
Related posts:

  1. A Framework for Evaluating the Modern CIO – The CIO Report – WSJ

Looking back on the first year of my EA role at Bristol

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Presentation to the JISC Transformations Programme A couple of weeks ago I presented some thoughts on what I’ve learned through doing Enterprise Architecture in my new role at the University of Bristol this last year. The event was the JISC “Doing Enterprise Architecture workshop” and the slides to my presentation can be found here: Slide […]

Looking back on the first year of my EA role at Bristol

by

Presentation to the JISC Transformations Programme A couple of weeks ago I presented some thoughts on what I’ve learned through doing Enterprise Architecture in my new role at the University of Bristol this last year. The event was the JISC “Doing Enterprise Architecture workshop” and the slides to my presentation can be found here: Slide […]

iTV: will it change the way we collaborate?

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Photo credit: jakeromeThere had been several rumors about Apple making a TV.  Will this be another game changer, like the iPhone and iPad?  Will Apple be able to leverage TV’s unique form factor to create a new paradigm for collaboration?Alre…

iTV: will it change the way we collaborate?

by

Photo credit: jakeromeThere had been several rumors about Apple making a TV.  Will this be another game changer, like the iPhone and iPad?  Will Apple be able to leverage TV’s unique form factor to create a new paradigm for collaboration?Alre…

Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

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Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.

An excerpt:

“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.

The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.

There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.

Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””

via Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.