What is CIO

Chief Information Officer

A Chief Information Officer or CIO is the highest executive of the company who is responsible for ensuring optimum IT infrastructure being provided to the employees for efficient operations. He is the guardian of IT performance and management. A CIO carefully sifts through the different technologies in the market and integrates inventive methods that best suit the business needs of the company in order to augment the ongoing process.

Role of a CIO 

There is no definitive role of a CIO. The position entails him to intuitively scrutinize the business growth objectives of the company and produce value proposition of his business through the best available use of technology. The CIO ensures that the technology systems of the company are the complaint to meet the business requirements of the company. By stating so, it means that a CIO decides whether an enterprise should engage in automation, move to the cloud, or use artificial intelligence to raise its competitive edge.

Other key duties of a CIO includes:

• Building a competent customer service platform

• Budgeting and planning

• Discussions with suppliers and vendors

• Team building initiatives through technology

• Difference of roles between a CIO and CTO

Often, the roles and responsibilities of a CTO and CIO seem blurry and people use the designations interchangeably to refer to the same person. However, this is not the case. A Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is more like a company’s top technology architect who is responsible for inventing technology solutions that the company would market. A Chief Information Officer, on the other hand, is the personnel who discover the technology that is best fitted for the company to accomplish the tasks.

The strategies developed by the CTO ensure the revenue generation model of the company through the products and service solutions offered to achieve them. A CIO alternatively, plans for boosting the profit margin of the company through the judicious use of technology.

Etymology 

With the emergence of computing in business during the late 60s, the first generation of CIOs came into form. The sole responsibility of the CIO was to plan for the company’s IT strategies. As information system started growing stronger, the liabilities of the CIO in an enterprise became more visible. As a technology expert of the company, the CIO started deciding on the appropriate measure for bringing judicious alignment between IT and business.

Today, with the emerging times, the adoption of IT has gone beyond the central data processing departments of the company. Hence, the significance of a CIO is more than ever before. In the present times, data-enabled complex resource planning such as ERP and successful business process re-engineering is key denominators of the achievement of the company brought to the table by a CIO. 

A CIO should be a visionary who is able to see ahead of time and be able to distinguish key industry innovations. As a skilled leader who can convince people to adopt new technology, he should be able to build a competent platform for his enterprise.

Chief Information Officer simply known as CIO is one of the key expertise of any organization. Usually a CIO keeps the track of trends in the market in check with the software and hardware in order to implement effective strategies to push the company to next level. The designation of CIO gained status only after the inauguration of information technology (IT). Other important expertises were also designated after the evolution of IT.

The need for CIO aroused with the complexity in planning, budgeting, security and some specific areas of IT. Every CIO should posses business skills, organizational skills, technical skills and leadership skills. As a CIO guides the employees in the right direction, it’s mandatory for every CIO to posses all these skills. One role every CIO is maintaining the budget of the company and certainly being a CIO has their own risks, as they layout the strategy for the company and even if one fails their company may face a setback it may be major or minor depending upon the situation. As the technology further evolves they can be left with a bottleneck situation if they don’t keep pace with it.

In reference with the census recorded by payscale, an average CIO gets $168,188 per year and the highest salary is $295,000.