STAMFORD, Conn. – The role of the chief information officer (CIO) is no longer limited to just managing IT, and that role will continue to evolve in the next few years, according to a worldwide survey conducted by Gartner Executive Programs.

Of the 1,500 CIOs surveyed for the Gartner EXP report, “Making the Difference: The 2008 CIO Agenda,” 25 per cent of CIOs come from a business background rather than an IT background, but even those who come from an IT background are increasingly being asked to learn more about the business and industry their companies work in. Likewise, CIOs coming from a business background have to be willing and able to learn about IT so they can apply their business knowledge to it, said Tina Nunno, managing vice president of EXP research at Gartner.

Gartner asked CIOs a variety of questions regarding structural and transitional changes in the enterprise. The results showed that 85 per cent of CIOs are expecting significant change in what is expected of them in the next three years, Nunno said.

“As a result, they’re expecting changes in what IT is going to be needed to deliver,” she said.

There are changes occurring at two separate levels, Nunno explained. The first is the scope of responsibility of the CIO as an individual and the second is the role of IT in the organization. A decade ago, IT was about automating processes, but now the IT organization’s role has much more to do with doing sophisticated data analysis that enables enterprise to be competitive.

As for the role of the CIO, Nunno said it’s becoming more like other C-level executives, in that more CIOs are being expected to contribute to the business in other ways than just being responsible for the IT organization. According to the survey, a large number of CIOs have an additional one to three non-IT responsibilities. For instance, many of them are responsible for business process recruitment because they tend to be good at project management, Nunno said.

“We’re seeing this interesting, logical extension where increasingly the CIO is being expected to be the business project recruitment leader, and as a result, so is the rest of the IT department,” she said.

With the evolution of Web 2.0, IT is also responsible for gathering a lot of customer data that comes in through a business’ online presence. Customers expect enterprises to know them and what they want, so the CIO and the IT organization is also often responsible for business intelligence collection and analysis.

“As you can imagine, IT plays a really big role in that because IT gathers information on the customers,” Nunno said.

In fact, of the top CIO technology priorities for 2008, business intelligence applications ranked number one, followed by enterprise applications, and servers and storage technologies. The top 10 list of technology priorities was rounded out with legacy modernization, technical infrastructure, security technologies, networking (voice and data), collaboration technologies, document management, and service-oriented architecture and service-oriented business applications.

Organizations are looking for well-balanced CIOs that have a broad range of knowledge that relate to business executive skills and technical skills, Nunno said. CIOs will continue to come from both business and technical backgrounds, but they’ll need to willing and able to broaden their skills so they can be powerful, compelling executives, she explained.

“They’re headed in that direction very rapidly,” Nunno said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnecIT

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