Today’s digital and technology leaders are marathon runners. The technical complexity of the role has increased. So have the stakes and the risks. CIOs and equivalents need a wide strategic bandwidth, high connectivity with the board and organization, and inspirational change management.  

“The major impact on the CIO agenda happened three or four years ago; the cloud, cyber-security, remote work. Those, and big data, were the major turning points,” says one Amrop Partner. Today, businesses are more agile, thanks to less reliance on traditional ERP systems and mainframe implementations, in favor of cloud-based subscription models. “Businesses have become much quicker at adapting new versions and technologies and the entry barriers are much lower.” 

“Of course, in the e-commerce space, for players such as Amazon, digital was already happening,” explains Amrop’s Global Digital Practice Leader. “So, there were two kinds of processes in companies, those focused on e-commerce and digital, making a huge impact, and others focusing on digitizing or automating the enterprise.” 

“Many companies had done a lot of M&A, taking over others with an IT legacy and there were big integration questions. A lot of the big corporates had about eighty different kernels in SAP and pushed them back in that period to twelve. I’m now looking at a company which has only three, because they’re focusing on data. It’s a different thinking.” 

The twin forces of cloud and data remain paramount and fuel AI, today’s game-changer 

“If you don’t have your data in order, you can’t have proper AI,” he continues. An Amrop Managing Partner recalls a conversation with an AI specialist in Hong Kong. “His company is leading the insurance industry in data use. They cross sell and are deploying AI and machine learning to create a health business and tap into the whole ecosystem.” Furthermore, digitization enables the company’s representatives to meet with their customers “on a daily basis.”  

The Amrop Partner raises another force, cyber-security: “We saw an accelerated change to that role a few years back with the major cyber-crime attacks.”  

Ultimately, the change in the CIO role is due to a bouquet of factors: “the impact of work on company infrastructure, on how we use data and insights and digitize pretty much everything in and around ourselves. That journey has already started, and many companies are quite far down that road. Or at least they know where they’re going.” 

As ‘data’ becomes ‘information’, the CIO is rising.  

The position belongs on the board, or close to it, he says. What of smaller organizations, or those who want a lean board? “If it’s only a two-person board, some people must report to the CEO and some to the CFO.” Beyond the C-suite: “We are seeing on non-executive boards that a lot of digital board members came into the organization.” 

AI is a propellant: “I know from attending the Gartner Forum last year that around half of the boards of larger corporations have already discussed AI with the Chief Executive Officer. Half of CEOs have already experimented with ChatGPT or other tools.” 

Double helix: IT and business strategy are intertwined 

“You once designed a business strategy then an IT strategy,” says this Amrop Partner. “You don’t do that now. Digital is the business nowadays and you can’t divide the two.” Of all the C-suite domains, says an Amrop Managing Partner, technology and digitization have evolved the most. “They have always been one of the biggest cost centers, but they have moved to ‘mission-critical strategic unit’. 

Bigger branches need deep roots and wide support 

“A proper function has business partners,” says the leader of Amrop’s Digital Practice. “Just as you have the HR business partner, you have an IT business partner. So it’s a normal model, no different to any other function. Let’s not design strange new concepts around that.”  

The CIO must also be well-supported: “Any member of the management team, and particularly the CEO, need to be very conversant with these topics,” says an Amrop Managing Partner. “You still have lots of executive boards where the majority of people are not sufficiently technology-savvy and not good sparring partners for the CIO.” Indeed, research by Amrop’s Global Digital Practice found that only 30% of digital leaders (and equivalents) believe that their board generally demonstrates understanding and support.4 

Progress has been made, says Amrop’s Global Practice Leader and author of the report. But some firms still need to examine their priorities. “Especially if they’re only driven by profit and not looking at the future of an investment. It’s highly strategic and important that the board understands that.” 

As the CIO role matures, the links with lateral domains must strengthen  

“It’s becoming a more grown-up function where you really need to understand the different sub-domains to be a good leader. The same can be said of the CFO who needs to understand tax, investments, controlling, or the CHRO who needs to understand industrial relations, people, culture, and HR tech. “If there is a people system that allows you to track relevant employment data, churn and satisfaction, I’d expect the HR to understand and know about that system and its possibilities.” So, a C-suite member should be ‘literate’ about their own domain, and ‘conversational’ about the rest. 

Moreover: “IP creation means working with the Chief Legal Officer and here, when we talk about AI, ChatGPT is very dangerous. An R&D staff member could be inputting a recipe into ChatGPT to find out how it can be simplified and in doing so, enters one of the ingredients. Just as you don’t want USB sticks lying around, ChatGPT is comparable.  

“The COO is also very interesting when it comes to digitizing operations into more of a service and selling it to other companies.” 

Particularly for technical companies, private equity are scrutinizing the CIO/CEO relationship: “They examine how much [the CEO] knows about the technology. Is there a good CIO next to him or her, helping to really make the change?” 

With four dimensions (Strategy, Organization, Culture and Skills) containing 24 items, Amrop’s Digital Competency Model© captures the core aptitudes for CIOs and equivalents. The Amrop Global Digital Practice has established that those working for High Performing Organizations (posting 3-year growth) are bigger-picture thinkers and better at adding business value.5 They score significantly higher on all four dimensions of the ADCM model than counterparts working for Low Performing Organizations (posting 3-year decreasing or flat growth). As the full article sets out, two indicators will rise: inspirational leadership and virtual leadership.  

The ‘T-shaped profile’ needs to be more deeply engraved than ever 

The evolution in the CIO role has clear implications for hiring organizations in terms of the source and maturity of candidates. “The CIO role is a profession; there is a lot of education,” says the leader of Amrop’s Global Digital Practice. “Most CIOs come more from an information technology education and have a Masters degree.” 

This reflects the change in the role. Technology is no longer an ‘add-on’. “In the past it was mainly economics or finance people who moved into the IT domain. There were fewer people with IT/Digital DNA. Of course, you still have political sciences people who know a lot about this domain because they’ve worked in it for thirty years. You typically see that they are educating themselves and following all kinds of courses.” 

Even a young domain requires maturity 

Does the relative recency of the technology domain mean that today’s fittest leaders are also young digital natives? “It’s important to hire an executive search firm who can advise on what the CIO role should look like, looking at the future state of the organization as well as its current state,” he advises. “And you can hire a young CIO, or a profile who is more of an IT director and let this person develop into the CIO because your organization is going to expand.” 

He recalls how a legacy semiconductor player hired the CIO of a global pharmaceutical organization as transformation leader “because it’s such a big role. It depends on size and if the organization is globalizing or regionalizing. But seniority is really important. And typically these profiles are in around their fifties. In the past, their forties.” Even the embryonic candidate who will evolve in the role is no spring chicken: “...also already in their forties, or end thirties. But not younger.” 

An Amrop Managing Partner signals that older technology executives are in demand by organizations that are still dealing with legacy infrastructure. “So, it’s going to be an extremely diverse population in technology — of all ages and backgrounds.” 

In other Amrop articles, we examine the evolution of the CEO, CFO, the COO, and the CHRO.