What Makes a Great CIO?

摘要

Is your chief information officer above average, aver-age or below? What makes a great CIO? Answers will depend on how you define the job. In May the estimable Harvard Business Review published a bombshell of an article by one of its former editors, Nicholas Carr. The piece was titled "IT Doesn't Matter"―and if you believe Carr's premise, you might have to alter your thinking about the CIO's role in your company. Carr wrote: "Information technology is best understood as the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries―from the railroad to the telegraph to the electric generator. For a brief period, as they were being built into the infrastructure of commerce, all these technologies opened opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain real advantages. But as their availability increased and their cost decreased―as they became ubiquitous―they all became commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered. That is exactly what is happening to information technology today, and the implications for corporate IT management are profound."