Does the CIO have a natural life cycle, like new technology or governments or marriages (or indeed love affairs) or frogs or food fads? Is there a honeymoon period, a phase of maximum effectiveness and then an inevitable decline down a back slope?
At first the very suggestion might seem negative, potentially undermining the hard-won achievement of finally by the 21st century getting an ICT leader and evangelist into the historically closed ranks of the C-suite. On the other hand, when you look at the multiple characteristics of the CIO role — or indeed the multiple roles of the CIO — it is logical that in any organisation there will be specific dominant needs at the time of appointment that will very likely determine the shorter term brief.
In fact it is probably reasonable to suggest that few CIOs are actually appointed to fulfil the full range of potential in the ICT and media discussions of the job. A considerable proportion of organisations will have a narrower, more focussed job description for the CIO and there is nothing wrong with that. Many of them will have adopted the C-suite titling but will still be in the ‘IT Director’ stream of traditional culture. As with most senior jobs, a tight brief makes life easier because additional responsibilities and expectations will accrete over time anyway if the person appointed is any good.
“Much of the media chatter about the CIO and the role is actually based on a degree of ignorance, prejudice and a failure to appreciate how much about the business an IT person needs to understand to do a good tech job in the first place”
The life expectancy in the job is likely to be closely related to the change and innovation that is inevitably part of the package and expected even when there is realistically no budget for any such initiatives. But there is also the glorious opportunity where the new CIO is hired with jubilant fanfares and the dawn of a new age is expected the following morning.
Tone setting
The first few months in any new visible role do tend to set a tone and style and probably generate a set of early impressions in the ‘audience’ that will endure. Disproportionately, in all likelihood, if there are any negatives. If you think of 100 days as a strong Quarter, in the language of C-suites and PLCs, it also has a spurious authenticity. Some of us might argue that fiscal quarters are exclusively about profit/loss and just maybe share values, with no logical relationship to ICT projects and just an accounting link to investment.
But in the politics of the enterprise, perception is everything. For the CIO it is in large measure the impressions made on C-suite peers and especially the CEO and CFO that count. The general constituency of colleagues will remain fickle, by and large, responding to recent ICT-related activities whether help desk responses or smart new technology deployed. In general that will be permeated and coloured by gossip, feedback from IT department colleagues and observations at the Christmas party if the season coincides.
So there is clearly something of a suggestion that an incoming CIO needs to identify some innovation, improvement or project very early that can be speedily delivered as tangible proof that things are happening. We have to be talking about low-hanging fruit and, yes, there is something a little bit phoney about going for a showpiece accomplishment in a short time frame — but that’s showbiz.
The context for all of this is research that shows that CIOs generally have shorter periods in that position than other members of the C-suite. The patterns that have emerged in the USA and Europe are not greatly dissimilar, given that even the global population of CIOs is hardly big enough for precision statistics. In the USA it has varied from three to five years in the job, with four years or so reported as the average on both sides of the Atlantic. Towards the end of the Noughties, apparently, it was down to a little above three years in the USA. Is that sort of duration good, bad or indifferent? FTSE companies in the UK do not hold on to their CFOs or CEOs for all that much longer — just under and just over six years respectively.
The negative view would be that there is an inevitable trajectory to a CIO appointment. Like politicians, do all CIO careers tend to end in failure? There is certainly a perception that an early honeymoon period followed by a year or two of accomplishment with enhanced ICT capabilities and even transformation. That is then followed by decline with a number of factors at play including a pause or plateau in innovation and technology investment — or another instance of familiarity breeding indifference.
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