Two years ago, I attended The Oxford CIO Academy at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. The ways my professor interpreted the “I” in the word CIO gave me a fresh perspective on our jobs and got me thinking.
Chief Information Officer is the most widely known, and we all are proud of that. However, the more prevalent one in the our evening circles is CIO equals Career Is Over. While that sounds humorous, a CIO does have to wear many caps, literally, in order to deliver the desired outcome and to ramp up the career.
While clouds appeared on our horizon a long time ago, on-premises assets still exist, resulting in a hybrid architecture. Ensuring integrity between the systems across the cloud made us the Chief Integrity Officer. And in order to ensure that the myriad of systems, across functions, geographies, and business entities will continue to interact seamlessly, the new role of Chief Integration Officer emerged.
Big data gave a new meaning to the title Chief Information Officer, who has to explore, extract, and refine the data and present the information to act upon. This basically sounds like oil exploration, but indeed data is the new oil in today’s information-driven world. To prevent leaking this black gold into the cyberspace and to protect from cyber criminals, the CIO has to take a new avatar of the Chief Insulation Officer.
With internet giving us a flat world and smartphones bringing entry barriers down, there is an ever increasing threat from the startup garages. The CIO has to constantly use imagination and intellect to generate new ideas and take on the role of the Chief Imagination Officer. Mere imagination will not see the light at the end of the tunnel, so we have to be creative, inventive and wearing the cap of the Chief Ingenuity Officer.
In short, a CIO can’t just relax and bask in the glory of what was done over the years or what’s happening right now. Continual disruption is the new norm for the forward looking Chief Innovation Officer.
With so many challenges and opportunities, the job becomes certainly demanding and interesting too. Welcome to the world of Chief Interesting Officers…!
This post is dedicated to all fellow CIOs who make the world interesting by their acts, day by day, system by system and people by people. Cheers…!
The post is authored by our CEO, Suhas Mhaskar, who has played the role of CIO for many years and continues to enjoy the same even today.