CIOs have long had to put up with derogatory views of their position in corporations, typecast as burn-outs or incompetents at the end of their trajectory ("Career Is Over"), frequently disregarded when it comes to corporate planning or strategy, viewed as errand-boys who are to be given a task and then monitored closely until they have managed, somehow straining through their alleged incompetence, to get it more or less completed. Or possibly just cannon fodder, to be fired the next time some important technology initiative comes around so a fresh face can be brought in to implement it.

Perhaps the zenith of this perspective can be seen in a recent trend in enterprises of dual role CIOs, taking an established corporate officer elsewhere and tacking the title on with their current one, resulting in such delicacies as CIO/Senior VP of Customer Service. What does it say about a position when you can put your Chief Sustainability Officer in it (okay, that's head of a business division in that example, but it's a technical division) without a second thought?

So it's good to be able to put up a counter-example every now and again, as we can today in pointing out that TD Ameritrade has promoted CIO Dave Kelley to the Chief Operations Officer role. Good on ya, Dave! And on Ameritrade... a business which apparently has realized, as far too few do, that there are significant relationships between operations and IT... certainly more significant than those between accounting and IT, at least. There's no question in my mind that a properly prepared and knowledgeable CIO can make for a formidable COO, bringing in solid knowledge of what IT can and can't do for business operations. At the end of the day, as everyone preaching business alignment is sure to acknowledge, that's really the point of adopting IT in any enterprise. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a CIO might have some excellent ideas on how to do it from the big table.