CIOs Are Finally Getting Some Respect

Esther Shein

09-03-2014

Except from the article:

Amid all of the pressure on CIOs to innovate while keeping the lights on and fostering better communications and aligning with the business – topics that have been addressed here regularly – comes some good news: CIO tenure is on the rise.

That’s an observation from Peter High, president of Metis Strategy, a Washington, D.C.-based boutique strategy and management consulting firm, who I spoke with last week. Anecdotal information High has gotten from friends at major executive recruiting firms suggests tenure for CIOs is climbing above four years.

High attributes this to the fact that the CIO role is as complex as any role in the corporate hierarchy, and recognition that a longer-term perspective is needed. Finally! Switching out players used to be easy to do, he maintains, because the rest of the organization didn’t understand what the CIO did. “That’s partially the CIO’s fault, because they used different language and different metrics to measure the performance of IT, creating a virtual black box around the department from the perspective of the rest of the organization.”

To read the remainder of the article, please visit The Enterprising CIO

If interested, please read a related article on how CIOs can position themselves for business success, written by Peter High and published in ON Magazine.