InformationWeek

November 19, 1998

I am a 31-year-old female with undergraduate degrees in computer science and business management. I have worked for very large corporations in the health-care and financial industries and have held a variety of positions. I recently moved to New England to take a position with a small software/service bureau company as a senior technical strategist. As a technical strategist, I have a high-level overview of many technologies but specialize in none. Where should I concentrate my effort given my goal to be a CIO for a small to medium-sized company? What time frame, if any, should I give myself?

If your goal is to be a CIO someday, you should be well rounded in all facets of business enabled technology. Your current role is an essential piece to being a successful CIO, but you need to have experience driving a strategy through to implementation. It's great to be the strategist, but companies evaluate potential CIO candidates on ability to drive an agenda through to completion, which ultimately affects the bottom line impact on the organization. Also, a successful CIO has been responsible not only for infrastructure and architecture issues, but also large-scale application development initiatives as well as evaluating integration and consolidation efforts. A CIO will be judged not only by the project, but by its success and/or failure.

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