RSSCan a CIO be successful without IT experience?
Something that’s been sitting on a back burner over here for a while is a post commenting on Chris Curran’s post last month at CIO Dashboard asking “Can a CIO be Successful Without IT Experience?” It’s not an academic question at all; a fair chunk of industry CIOs come to the position from the general management side of their businesses, rather than ascending up the IT ladder. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the historic position of IT as corporate whipping boy, the old boys network in many companies favoring candidates who came up in the core part of the business, and the general tendency of people who are good at IT to be less good at the traditional executive skills of schmoozing and carrying on semi-comprehensible conversations (I’m not suggesting executives are necessarily all that comprehensible themselves, I suppose, but each are incomprehensible in different forms). The IT troops often resent serving under such PHBs and there are swaths of anecdotes covering the damage such technology illiterate leaders do to both their staff and their corporations.
So it might surprise you to learn that my answer to the question is yes, a CIO without IT experience can be successful. Like anything else, it requires effort and a willingness to learn. Curran points out that putting a CIO without IT experience on the executive leadership team effectively means that the team only has representatives of the “business” perspective and leaves IT without a voice, but this conclusion rests on two faulty assumptions. One is that the business/IT perspective are necessarily divergent; the other is that the CIO is a static entity entirely governed by his or her past experiences.
Although the bulk of comments on Curran’s post tend to agree with his conclusion, that CIOs must have IT experience (although, wisely, most also point out that business experience is equally necessary), the counter-points are more interesting and more informative. One tells of a CISO he worked with who came from a non-IT background, who took and passed the CISSP along with her staff. To me, that illustrates the real issue and objectives much better than some generic expectation that “IT experience” will satisfy the requirements for being a successful CIO. We’ve all known people in the field whose “IT experience” is more a set of leg-irons than a useful tool to them. The key is to be able to learn new technologies and apply them appropriately. And I would argue that whether you are capable of this or not is not reliant on having done so in the past.
Further, as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, the aspects of it that matter most are those applications, not the nuts and bolts beneath them. IT experience implies a certain familiarity with technology as it has been available to business for the past twenty or thirty years. But a CIO whose appreciation of technical capabilities and roles is informed by these dark ages of our history may find themselves more hampered than aided by that experience. We see this almost daily in the tales of various IT departments struggling to keep up with modern technologies, undercut by (you guessed it!) average users with only business experience who are able to apply what they know using newer, easier tools to make their departments more efficient.
To Curran’s point, I would agree that a CIO needs to be able to represent technology at the executive level. But I disagree that past experience is the only way to achieve that capacity.
Yes, a CIO can be successful without IT experience.
A CIO can be unsuccessful with tons of IT experience.
Success depends upon the person’s potential.
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and additional exploration of this. Actually, I don’t disagree with any of your main points. However, I also don’t think I made either assumption you call out as faulty – of course the CIO or sr IT leader learns and isn’t just about his/her past and yes, business and IT aren’t necessarily divergent in their goals and thinking.
My belief is that strategic decisions driven by or dependent upon information technology must be informed by the organization’s ability to execute against it and the viability of the idea. I would rather have someone with some deep, relevant experience in working with/managing/leading related initiatives vs not. Yes, some successful CIOs have done this by building a high performing team around them with this expertise, but I would rather have a CIO with the personal, first hand experience.
Thanks for the clarification, Chris. I think that may actually illustrate the real difference in our positions; in my view, past IT experience is proving a hindrance to many CIOs today easily as often as it is a help. One has only to look at the difficulty with which many IT organizations are adapting to non-traditional service delivery as it is represented by SaaS, cloud platforms, and personal mobile devices for a demonstration of how deep industry experience can prove a chain tethering one to the dungeon of the past as opposed to a rope to assist on the climb toward the future. I think that much innovation and success in IT today is being accomplished by people who have no idea what the supposed viability of their ideas have, while many of those whose appreciation of that quality is informed by their past experiences in a rapidly changing field are unduly resistant to the possibilities.
Actually, one’s perspective on that resistance may well be that it is justified and that the forces of centralized, traditional IT will prevail and the industry return to the status quo, but that again is a perspective likely formed by one’s past IT experience, incorrectly in my view.
So, given that I think that past experience at this particular point in the evolution of the industry is at best an indifferent indicator of CIO capability, I still disagree with (although I quite understand) your perspective.
Given that CIO should stand for Chief Information Officer but in reality sadly stands for Chief IT Manager Officer, it is imperative that they need to have IT experience.
Trouble is any association with technology firmly tarnishes the CIO as operationally focused and thus unlikely to make a strategic contribution.
In my opinion, this is why the IT industry has failed to take its rightful place in the C-suite.
The focus of the IT industry and the CIO will need to radically change if this situation is to change.
I certainly agree with your conclusion, Ade. However, I haven’t noticed the resistance to operational experience as a limiting factor at the executive level; quite the contrary, in fact. The lean revolution in manufacturing and other traditional industries, with its attendant mandate to “go and look” to see how things really happen on the shop floor have made operational experience prized once again in many leadership circles. I would say CIOs have difficulty making strategic contributions frequently not because they are unfairly ignored, but simply because they don’t have the business background to make them, or at least not in terms the rest of the leadership team can understand.
With respect to IT management at the technical level, that’s what CTOs are for.