A trend among U.S. companies is to give their CIOs marching
orders outside the mainstream IT organization, charging them with
overseeing the supply chain, for instance, or spearheading
something less tangible like innovation or customer management. The
thinking: If CIOs (and their organizations) are to really engage
with internal business operations and, more important, with
partners and customers, they must take on formal responsibilities
outside their core technology domain.
That approach makes a lot of intuitive sense, but how many hats
are too many? At Harrah's Entertainment, former CIO Tim Stanley
(InformationWeek's 2007 Chief of the Year) ended up running four
separate units: gaming at about 50 casinos in three countries; a
12-person innovation team; a startup tasked with licensing the
features of the Harrah's customer-loyalty program; and the
600-employee IT organization. Stanley stepped down in January,
citing personal and professional reasons, and one wonders if a
contributing factor was that he was spread too thin at a time when
Harrah's was under intense financial pressure. It's notable that
Harrah's named two people to assume his former duties.
Cardinal Health, in announcing last week that Jody Davids is
leaving as CIO, said her successor, former Motorola CIO Patricia
Morrison, would not be overseeing the shared services that cut
across finance, HR, procurement, and IT, an area Davids had run as
executive VP. Earlier this year, when Davids first said she would
be leaving Cardinal Health, she indicated that the shared-services
role pulled her into too much internal, administrative minutia and
didn't leave enough time for business- and customer-oriented
projects. And at Davids' recommendation, Morrison will report to
CEO George Barrett; Davids had reported to the CFO.
One school of thought is that the CIO and other business
technology executive positions are full-time jobs in themselves.
Additional duties, especially when they entail profit and loss
responsibility, can be an enormous distraction from a job that's
already tortuously complex. CIOs shouldn't be managing new products
or overseeing non-IT operations in their spare time any more than
the CFO should be running sales. Or so goes the
counterargument.
The best CIOs, of course, have their hands in every aspect of
the business, regardless of whether those responsibilities have
been etched into their title. Some of the best CIOs draw on their
experience in line-of-business positions, whether in sales,
marketing, HR, customer service, or product development. For
example, General Motors' newly appointed CIO, Terry Kline, is a
technologist with serious product development chops, having
previously coordinated process reengineering and deployed
information systems to support product development across GM's
units. Other CIOs come to that position from outside the IT
organization. Anheuser-Busch's Joseph Castellano, for example, was
tapped as CIO in 2007 because of his broad, 24-year functional
experience at the company, including stints in HR, retail
marketing, and operations
Clearly, there's no right or wrong approach to setting CIO
responsibilities. Experience and aptitude are critical factors, as
are the company's priorities at the time. Stanley, whose Harrah's
tenure was marked by hypergrowth, had more of an entrepreneurial
background than his main successor, CTO Katrina Lane, who as a
physicist and analytics expert is a more hard-core technologist.
Harrah's played to their strengths.
What do you think is the optimal pedigree and job description
for a CIO? We'd love to hear--and share--the most compelling
examples.