Boardroom Despatches: How the CIO differs from the traditional IT director

This has been the year of the first silicon.com CIO Forum, an event where I really fired up the audience by saying it is easier for an executive to move from a non-technical business background to heading up IT than vice versa.

Boy did I feel the wrath of some of the CIOs and other IT heads in attendance - and even afterwards, from those who weren't at the event but read what I said on these pages.

I'd say there was a 70:30 split disagreeing with my thinking. This is both embarrassing and instructive.

I heard several criticisms.

"Why is Rene Carayol fit to provide that reasoning?" asked one tech boss.

"A trite statement from Rene" was the feedback from another.

But I didn't hear that from any CEOs. Research commissioned this year by headhunters Heidrick and Struggles is a good starting point in my defence.

A senior partner at that firm, Kelvin Thompson, has placed over 200 CIOs and their survey interviewed 250 CEOs. It asked, among other things, what are the main briefs they give headhunters. There are three.

First is the common cry of 'get me out of this mess!' It comes from an organisation fighting for survival, one where the former or current CIO has built a client-supplier relationship which is likely to end in the supplier getting the sack. The majority of IT sits in this category.

The second is a 'more of the same, please' scenario. An organisation is looking to keep its competitiveness. There is an IT and business partnership where IT is the junior partner.

This is better than the first brief but not perfect. The CIO is merely an implementer.

The final brief is where we have a CEO and board looking for a senior executive. They know they are looking to break away from the norm and do something different. This is exciting. This is progressive.

It comes from a position of 'The machine works and now we are going to leverage it.'

So take a step back a second. My view is that in the UK we are not seeing any discernible value from IT. The traditional IT director is seen as a cost reducer, all about efficiency. That is often against a backdrop of increasing expenditure, despite current analyst figures showing they are being asked to do more with less - that's because it is often less of a percentage of annual revenues, where revenues are often rising.

The cost of standing still is actually increasing year-on-year in some cases. Even an upgrade in a large organisation to Windows XP can cost millions.

In his role as head of IT, the IT director is technology-oriented. He is good at supplier management and not into politics.

Now take a CIO. A CIO is all about leadership and politics. A CIO should be about growth of top line sales.

We are talking about a back office orientation versus a front office orientation.

About someone who is at their core defensive versus someone who is aggressive.

Kelvin Thompson at Heidrick told me that great CIOs are almost impossible to find. And that's a shame.

I want to make it clear that for those who do lean towards the former category there is nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with being a utility. But the debate - and the debate I was involved in at the CIO Forum - was all about the front of the house.

One respondent who was critical of my position was actually an IT director reporting in to a CIO. I felt that actually proved my argument.

Let me tell you seven things that further characterise the new breed of CIO:

• They are visionary, inspired by a view of what the future of business will look like, not IT.
• They are revenue focused, not cost focused. This means their incentive plan is based on the growth of the business not cost savings. This will be like all executives whose performance reviews use key business metrics.
• They are brilliant collaborators. They are not afraid of partnerships and that means outsourcing and extending in other directions.
• They are business process re-engineers.
• They are comfortable with corporate governance, as all divisions have to be, and while they understand IT they won't get involved in its details unless they have to.
• They are not afraid to break rules - and create new rules.
• They are engineers but not technology engineers. Most importantly they are human capital engineers, they identify and nurture talent.

The debate then becomes what we're going to call this new beast. (And it's one that silicon.com has been having since the CIO Forum, as you can see here.)

To finish, let me leave you with this. First of all, here’s to the person who said: "The CIO is all about business leadership and until they've mastered that they will continue to live in the back office."

And - though I don't want to insult those in the back office - let me just say that a drone in the hive makes no honey.