October 26, 2007

CIO and Enterprise Architecture

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is the executive in charge of information technology in an organization. All information systems design, development, operations & maintenance, datacenter and support operations fall under CIO jurisdiction. Increasingly, CIOs are involved in creating business and e-business opportunities through information technology. Collaborating with other executives, CIOs are often working at the core of business development within the organization. (adapted from PCMAG.COM)

From this definition, we see two important roles for the CIO.

  1. Operations—the CIO is responsible for the IT operations of the organization (systems, datacenter, and so on).
  2. Strategy—the CIO plays a critical role in strategy and architecture (business and e-business opportunities).

In short, we can summarize the role of the CIO as follows:

CIO = Strategy + Operations

While the CIO has traditionally managed IT operations, we can see the CIO’s role and responsibility expanding more and more into strategy and architecture. Here are some other examples of this:

• “Typically, a CIO is involved with analyzing and reworking existing business processes, with identifying and developing the capability to use new tools, with reshaping the enterprise's physical infrastructure and network access, and with identifying and exploiting the enterprise's knowledge resources. Many CIOs head the enterprise's efforts to integrate the Internet and the World Wide Web into both its long-term strategy and its immediate business plans.” (TechTarget.Com)

• “The Chief Information Officer of an executive agency shall be responsible for…developing, maintaining, and facilitating the implementation of a sound and integrated information technology architecture for the executive agency”. (Clinger-Cohen Act).

More and more, we see the CIO focusing on architecture and the overall policy and planning of IT, while the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) handles day-to-day IT operations.

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