The New CIO: C Stands For Change

IT execs love to recount an old-school joke: CIO stands for "career is over." That joke dates back to a different time, when CIOs mostly dreaded making a bad vendor choice or botching an ERP project. Today's business climate depends on speed and agility more than statesmanship -- and CIOs dread falling behind the current pace and being deemed irrelevant.

 "The C in CIO stands more for change than chief," said Jonathan Feldman, CIO of Asheville, N.C., at the InformationWeek IT Leadership Summit at Interop New York on Tuesday.

That's a useful way to start examining the future of the CIO role. The CIO must manage tremendous change coming in cloud and mobile technologies, data analysis, and BYOD -- and even bigger, more fundamental changes as companies' core business models change to a focus on digital interactions with customers and partners.

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Ross Perot might call it a giant ripping sound, as companies all over the US rip up their old sales strategies and business processes and rewrite them for agile development teams and customer support teams that move at lightning speed.

What must the CIO navigating all that change bring along for the journey? For starters, the CIO must be a "master translator," says David Wright, CIO of McGraw-Hill Education, another speaker at the summit Tuesday. The CIO is the one who can fully speak the languages of the business and the technology experts, not only to get things done, but also to speak up when a real business concern looms, he says.

CIOs used to give a lot of orders. Get over it, Wright says: "It's not all about you."

PricewaterhouseCoopers chief technologist Chris Curran puts it another way: IT is becoming "consultative." PricewaterhouseCoopers data shows that between 35% and 50% of technology spend is happening outside of IT at top-performing companies, Curran says. Consult with these other business teams, or be deemed a laggard. Do technology demos often with these teams, he recommends, to build credibility, build awareness of what the IT team can do -- and build your team's business language skills. 

Wright goes as far as to teach his team not to say "IT and the business" but "IT and other parts of the business." His IT team works on every product launch as McGraw-Hill Education moves from a world built on paper textbooks to one based on software and online services for classrooms. The term "collaborative" doesn't do full justice to that kind of IT model; it's more like immersive.

Communication skills can trump pure tech skills for the future CIO. As Josh Oakhurst, chief strategy officer at Skookum Digital Works put it to the

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