Thoughts on the Changing Roles of the CIO and IS

The role of the chief information officer and the information services department in nearly all organizations has changed dramatically in the last ten to fifteen years and is evolving even today. In the first two decades of business personal computing, the CIO had three roles: 1) reporting how much of a budget the organization needed to purchase computing resources; and 2) supervising the information services department; and 3) providing technical support. Progressing technology has changed how organizations use information services, and as a consequence, the CIO’s role has changed as well.

Perhaps most importantly, information services now provides more than just hardware and printer support to other departments. IS is now the department that regulates the flow of information between departments. As a result, IS staff must have some knowledge of what the function of each department is, and how individual departments complement one another. The CIO still supervises IS, and she must have a business education in addition to an information technology background to be able to direct her staff accordingly.

In addition to being more involved in the business side of the organization, IS provides the applications that each department uses. In the past, each department would have its own application to accomplish whatever task it needed to. Now, in increasing numbers, organizations are moving toward enterprise applications, where one application or suite is appropriate for use by all departments. IS must be able to not only install and provide technical support for enterprise applications, but it must also know how the application works and why it works the way it does. This, once again, shows the necessity of the CIO and IS having a business background. For example, the accounting department must run certain reports a certain way in order to comply with generally accepted accounting principles, and the CIO/IS needs to know at least that GAAP exists in order to ask the right questions of Accounting or, preferably, know GAAP to be able to tweak the application or run it the way Accounting needs it run.

In the past five years, compliance with governmental and statutory regulations has become increasingly important. In fact, many organizations are hiring CIOs with legal backgrounds in addition to technological and business backgrounds so that the firms do not run afoul of the law. When the federal government enacted the Sarbanes Oxley legislation in response to the Enron scandal, it placed a terrific burden on companies to report and keep financial information, and in larger organizations, full-time IS employees dedicated to Sarbanes Oxley are common. For those organizations subject to Sarbanes Oxley, the CIO must plan, organize, and implement procedures for the entire company to comply with the law, and IS must perform the corresponding technological feats, such as installing and maintaining more complex backup systems. Other changes in the law have also affected the way the CIO and IS interact with the other departments in the organization. For example, changes in the rules that the federal courts use to conduct legislation now require companies to save electronic information for certain periods of time. It is the CIO’s responsibility for determining how and what information is saved, and, again, IS’s responsibility for installing and maintaining the necessary equipment and software. For example, the CIO must develop rules for saving internal and external email, both sent and received. IS must then implement those rules.

The roles of IS and the CIO have changed quite dramatically in the past decade. Until then, the CIO and IS were principally used for installing and repairing business personal computers and printers and maintaining mainframes and networking infrastructure such as servers, routers, and cabling. Changes in technology and the law have required an evolution of the IS department and of the CIO. Their roles are now broader and require more business and legal knowledge. This trend should continue as technology evolves, and organizations must ensure that CIOs and IS staff with these qualities, as well as the ability to anticipate and adapt, are intimate members of the company.