Chief Information Officer

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Chief Information Officer

Introduction

Information Technology has been playing a vital role in the buildup of organizations. It is providing valuable opportunities and along with real challenges. Without a strong information system, an organization cannot survive in the current scenario. To manage and supervise all the information technology's tasks, a position emerged under the name “Chief Information Officer (CIO)”. The position came into existence in the 1980s as a result of enhanced usage of information technology in organizations and the existence of information economy (Harris, 2011). CIO position has become vital and influential with the increased in IT involvement in processes of businesses and the overall strategy. Presently, CIOs have taken roles as a member of C-level executive team and have become a part of various important roles such as; management of information resources, role in vision formation for IT, changing the business situation, re-designing the policies of the firm and finally, the role in value creation for the business.

The Chief Information Officer of an organization actually holds the responsibility to look after all the resources of an organization that are related to information. The CIO further tries to ensure that this accumulated information helps in a positive way for the organization to effectively achieve the mission of the organization. Now, CIOs are considered as enterprise leaders and not just the technical person who deals in information technology alone. For doing so, CIOs are now required to have knowledge for all the business related skills and techniques that are present in other executive personnel (Polansky et al. 2004). A successful CIO has a mission for how to involve the technology in helping the organization to grow upward. This paper tries to justify the necessity of having a CIO, or perhaps merging the designation to a new executive position or an existing executive position. The justification is extremely important considering the fact that it has become an integral part of the executive committee.

Literature Review

A Chief Information Officer is a person who is a top layer IT executive with primary responsibilities related to the information technology department. Other common titles for the CIO are; information technology (IT) director, information technology vice president, or chief technology officer. However, CIO is the most accepted title throughout the world. According to the survey of 2008 by State of the CIO, 60 percent of the executives of information technology hold the title of a CIO, while the remaining 40 percent is distributed among information technology director, information technology vice president and chief technology officer, with performing the same functions (Austin et al., 2009).

When we talk about a CIO, we get the concept of a person who has the responsibility to manage the information system department in a business unit or a firm. However the role has changed to a certain extent in the recent past due to the all round demand from a CIO in a firm. A CIO also has to perform the important roles such as; business leadership and relationship ...