The secret of making the CIO grade

Aspiring CIOs should forget about career plans and focus on improving their business skills, according to a panel of ex-IT chiefs.

Speaking at the silicon.com CIO Forum, Brinley Platts, chairman of CIO Development, said: "In all my years working with CIOs, I've never met one with a career plan."

And the other panellists - made up of former CIOs and IT leaders - agreed they too had never set out to become CIOs.

Ric Francis, operations director of The Post Office and former Safeway CIO said: "I found myself constantly being frustrating by the organisation I was in, and always believed I could do a bit more [by] going out to find that challenge in another company."

Francis added his career started through the traditional technology route and he "accidentally ended up" as a CIO.

Mitchell Lenson, ex-CIO of Deutsche Bank, said his career was also unplanned and he followed an "entrepreneurial career management" path of swapping careers to improve his personal skill-sets to adapt to the role of being a CIO which he said is "all very much about transformation and change".

When quizzed about their next career move in a live poll at the silicon.com CIO Forum, most of the delegates said they planned to move to a better IT-related role in another organisation. The least popular options were staying in their current job or joining an IT vendor.

Lenson added: "The middle word in CIO is information, not technology - so if you are a chief technology officer you can worry about boxes and data centres - but if you are a CIO it's about information which everyone needs to see."

He added: "If you can understand what technology and how to apply technology to a problem that is a huge bonus [on the road to becoming a CIO]."