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.