What Should a CEO look for in a CIO

Whether hiring a CIO or a technician there are some fundamentals that always apply.
You should use the same decision criteria you would with proper "architecture" principles
- How will this new addition fit with the current team?
- How will their experience fit into corporate culture?
- How will their execution capabilities fit into corporate goals and objectives?
- Will this person be willing to stand up in front of a large crowd of executives and tell them what's needed and provide reasonable options for getting there?

As I've mentioned in previous posts I believe that in order for a CIO to be outstanding they have to be much like a CEO. The IT function is often times a mirror of the larger organization. There are teams or application groups that are focused on lines of business or certain business functions (I.e., Engineering or Marketing). Because IT is like a small version of the enterprise it's critical for the CIO to be able to tie these groups together in a common vision. Only by tieing the groups together can the CIO expect to deliver on broader cross functional corporate opportunities.

Building a vision for the entire IT organization that helps everyone understand how they fit into the bigger enterprise puzzle is crucial to team moral and to limiting intergroup competition or infighting. Building a vision isn't easy, but the CIO is more likely to be successful if s/he makes it a team effort. Getting your reports and thier reports involved in the effort will help to ensure buyin and it's an automatic way to contribute to the communication of the plan. The vision should demonstrate how each vertical when working together contribute to making a successful enterprise objective. An opposite example might be something like Marketing building a great lead candidate DB, but not realizing that they could be pulling information from the call center and or providing information directly to the CRM solution. IT must be in a position to bridge that gap and no one IT group can do that it takes the entire function.

Some of the best ways for the CIO to stay in the front of the enterprise are as follows:
- Develop strong relationships built on mutual trust with the exectutive team and their direct reports (remember that most of the real work and business understanding is in the 3rd layer from the CEO).
- Recruit and develop a strong IT leadership team
- Push members of the IT leadership team to go out and work directly in each of the business functions for 1 - 3 weeks out of the year
- Keep your communication with the entire team open and responsive. The minute the CIO or any leader believes they have all the answers, they've already failed. Your number one job is to figure out how to get the best ideas in front of the business, not yours!

I'll talk more about the CIO as mini CEO in future installments. My thoughts here aren't widely accepted or published anywhere, but the logic seems pretty clear to me.