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CIO Succession: Lack Of Inside Talent, Or Lack Of Opportunity?

Following up on a lively recent discussion about hiring an insider or outsider to replace the CIO. Eight in 10 CIOs expect their replacement to come from within, a recent survey says. The disconnect: Other execs and managers don't share the CIO's faith in insiders.

The research is from CDW's IT Monitor, which surveyed 1,062 business technologists. (Here's some of the data, though what follows is from a separate cut.)

Among execs at the same or higher level than the CIO, just 57% expect an internal hire to replace the CIO, compared with 82% of CIOs. For those at a lower level than the CIO, 67% expect an inside hire. Sixty percent of all respondents say their company does a very or somewhat effective job attracting and retaining executive IT talent, and 57% give their companies that rating for nurturing midlevel IT talent into executives.

The reasons companies might hire from within or outside is hashed out nicely in the comments section of John Soat's blog post cited above and another post on an in-house hire. But what's striking about this research is the gap between these two camps -- the CIOs and other execs at or above the CIO. Either the CIO isn't building as world-class a bench of management talent as he or she thinks, or isn't doing enough to expose those future leaders to the rest of the executive team to earn their confidence.

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