Anil Cheriyan, CIO of SunTrust, recently shared his framework for the perfect IT candidate. The seven qualities, including a business focus, end-to-end thinking, accountability, and transparency, can also be used to describe a great CIO.
In this week's edition of news for IT pros, we bring you a few more qualities and trends that CIOs should keep in mind as they continue to build their careers.
The rise of the revenue-generating CIO [CIO Dive]: In this article, Justine Brown says in order to keep up with rising expectations to contribute to their business' revenue stream, CIOs should tap into the power of data. “The idea of the revenue-generating CIO is based, at least in part, on the idea that crunching the numbers in a spreadsheet or model is no longer a job left solely for a sales or data analyst. CIOs can now take the insight an analyst provides and use it to shape parts of the business,” she writes.
Look who's coming for the CEO role [CIO]: This article suggests that those chief digital officers who are tasked with leading and delivering digital transformation may be the best candidates for the CEO roles of tomorrow. However, the article also notes that only 19 percent of businesses around the world have CDOs today, so CIOs have room to step into this role. The report's author Anna Frazzetto, notes, “The skills and knowledge of the CDO are rapidly becoming essential to business leadership, strategy and innovation. Whether the CDO title is there or not, business leaders who are spearheading digital transformation are often exactly who you want on the shortlist for CEO and who you want planning a bold, interconnected future for your business.”
To move to the cloud, you may need to fire your CIO [InfoWorld]: In this column, David Linthicum argues that an understanding of when to take risks is a career skill that can't be taught – and one that may be putting CIOs' job in jeopardy. He uses the example of cloud to make his point: “Here CIOs have a real opportunity to shine by making things cheaper and more agile. Or they may make themselves look foolish by passing up some real opportunities to change for the better. As a result, I see increasing numbers of CIOs out of a job because they mishandle the cloud shift.”
More news for CIOs
10 tech giants winning the talent war on LinkedIn [CIO]
Companies, employees not quite ready for cognitive technology wave of robotics, AI, machine learning [ZDNet]
