The prominence of the CIO position has tremendously risen while information, and the information technology (IT) that drives it, are becoming crucial to the operation and direction of the business in the modern organizations.
The role of CIO nowadays goes far beyond the “head of IT”, and expands to five main areas, namely: leading, strategic planning, governing, managing and investing.
CIO, as a C-level business leader, creates a vision of the firm’s future regarding the use of IT, and sells it to other senior executives as business solutions to the firm. Once a vision is identified, a strategy can then be formulated to accomplish the vision. As a member of the top management, CIO participates in the development of corporate strategy, and from which, he derives his IT strategy to address the business problems. It is also CIO’s responsibility to come up with policies, which can be used for both strategizing for the future and protection organization in short and long term.
Another role of CIO is the IT governance. However, it is not about control. The ultimate purpose of IT governance is to guarantee the business continuity of the organization in order to better develop business. To execute IT governance, it is necessary to identify
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With the emergence of new systems and technologies, it is the CIO’s responsibility to foster these changes from both technical and managerial aspects. As a technically elegant system does not necessarily mean a successful implementation, for instance, employees may fail to catch up with the new system. Apart from changes, CIO also needs to manage risks, reduce expenditure and limit damage by setting up controls and planning for possible disasters. A successful CIO can create an environment that is safe-to-fall for all employees, so that to encourage them to take chances and try new things without worrying about failure, in order to have more innovations for