What Type of CIO Do You Need?

To provide advice on “What type of CIO you need”, we must first baseline what we mean by a “Chief Information Officer”, as well as the other key technology leadership roles they interact with.

Ideally, the CIO is the head of the technology function, and a peer to the other C-suite (e.g., Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operations Officer) within the organisation. However, in practice technology is usually perceived as an enabling support function, rather than a strategic capability, and the CIO is perceived to be “outside” the inner circle.

How the CIO is positioned within your organisation, or how you would like them to be positioned, has an enormous impact on the type of CIO your organisation needs. This paper provides advice on how to pick a CIO who is or should be a peer to the C-suite.

Below is an overview of four key technology leaders.

Chief Information Officer (CIO)

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) is a strategic leader tasked with aligning its technology capabilities with its overarching business goals. The CIO must balance stability with innovation, ensuring the organisation’s technology investments enhance competitive advantage without compromising day-to-day operations. This role requires a multidisciplinary approach, integrating IT operations, digital transformation, and strategic technology development.

The CIO oversees systems critical to internal efficiency and business (e.g., customer service) excellence. They should avoid narrow approaches, such as focusing solely on cost-cutting or operational stability. Instead, they champion a balanced strategy that:
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- Mitigates risks while fostering innovation.
- Integrates business and technology goals.
- Guides the organisation through transformative changes like automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud adoption.

Depending on your organisation’s technology maturity, the CIO should either be a peer to or report to the COO. If the organisation has a large technology-driven-change agenda, then having the CIO as a C-suite peer is critical to ensure the CIO is able to influence the CEO without a filter. However, for an organisation that still views technology merely as an enabler, it may be more pragmatic to have the CIO represented by a well-respected COO. Note however that the personality and capability of the COO is a factor in this decision; having the CIO report to the COO should be avoided if the CIO is viewed as a cost-centre.

Chief Digital Officer (CDO) – Digital Transformation

The Chief Digital Officer focuses on transforming how the organisation engages with customers and operates internally using digital tools and processes. This often involves implementing customer platforms and portals, automating repetitive administrative tasks, and modernising workflows to increase customer-centricity or improve employee productivity. In some organisations, they also become the link between Marketing and IT; championing improved interaction with customers enabled by technology. In this way, the CDO ensures that digital initiatives enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency while aligning with the organisation’s broader business goals.

In larger organisations, the CDO (Digital) may work alongside the CIO, taking ownership of customer-facing tools and transformation projects. However, in smaller organisations, these responsibilities are typically consolidated under the CIO's role.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

In the private sector, a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) usually focuses on the technical aspects of innovation, often driving the development and adoption of new technologies. This means being on top of the organisation's technical direction, including technology innovation, architecture, and engineering. Their role is typically product-or-solution-oriented, with an emphasis on the development and application of emerging technologies.

In the public sector, CTO’s will often focus much more on architecture and engineering standards, planning and governance, aiming to manage down operational errors and ensuring efficient, secure and reliable technology. They generally do not focus on innovation and new technology, although it may form a small part of their accountabilities.

While the CTO may report to the CIO, they are typically more hands-on with technical development and vendor assessments. In smaller organisations, CTO responsibilities are often folded into the CIO's purview, as maintaining separate roles may not be feasible.

Chief Data Officer (CDO)

The Chief Data Officer (CDataO) oversees the organisation's data strategy, ensuring data governance, quality, and analytics are aligned with business goals. They focus on maximising the value of data assets, enabling insights for decision-making, and driving compliance with data-related regulations.

CDataOs typically report to the CIO or CEO, depending on the importance of data in the organisation's strategy. This role is growing in importance as organisations increasingly recognise the value of data-driven decision-making.

The CIO you need

Most CIOs in business and government can be classified as one of the following five archetypes:
- Operations Oriented
- Financial Oriented
- Procurement Oriented
- Business Oriented
- Development Oriented

High level descriptions of each of these archetypes are given below.

If your organisation understands that technology is a strategic capability at the core of everything you do, then the CIO you need is not any one of these archetypes. Contradictorily, the CIO must be someone with a broad multidisciplinary skillset that balances the attributes of these.

Being a professional CIO requires broad expertise in business, technology, asset management, change management, decision support, project management, procurement, design and cyber. CIOs also should be expert in the landscape of the technology industry worldwide. They should also have high-level skills in relationship management and communications.

A professional CIO will not favour any one discipline. They will have the leadership skills to ensure people of multiple disciplines can work together to achieve what is best for the organisation.

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The right CIO will balance risk in line with the needs of the business - they will take risks when they are worth it and help business areas understand when risks are unwise. The right CIO will champion a level of transformation, because (i) it is the lifeblood of any organisation, and (ii) because their predecessor probably has allowed the organisation to lag behind. 

The right CIO will operate seamlessly with the C-suite and be able to discuss issues in terms of business impact and relationship to the business strategy, without resorting to deep technology jargon. They will, however, build the C-suite's general understanding of technology and the “one-way-door” decisions have an outsized impact, and therefore must be made carefully. In doing so, they will build trust—something all the niche-types of CIO cannot do in the longer term.

Finally, be wary of any IT professional who has stayed too long in any one discipline. These people will be likely to solve all problems with the skill in their comfort-zone. The best CIOs have a kit-bag of skills and are great at deciding the right skill to apply to a given challenge. This means they have experience in several IT and business roles and can demonstrate learnings and empathy for peers and stakeholders.

1: Operations oriented

This CIO is often an IT person who has risen through the ranks of IT operations. They willbe good at ensuring things run smoothly day to day. This is the most popular industry choice for a CIO (partly because they are much easier to find), but that decision comes with significant downsides. This type of CIO ensures stability by resisting change. For them, success is all about day-to-day stability.

In a world of constant change, competitive pressures, and emerging technologies valuable to business, this type of CIO will soon frustrate the organisation. They do this by creating an “us and them” culture between business and IT, where their accountability for stability, security and IT cost is used as the reason to block or slow change. Every business leader who has had to wait for 6 months while IT performs a vendor assessment for a product the business already believes they want has met this CIO.

This CIO may even undermine the organisation's competitiveness and, on some occasions, relationships with customers and clients. The latter occurs because organisations will often be locked into outdated engagement mechanisms. The operations-oriented CIO sees architecture as a tool to lock in today's technologies without a perspective on the architecture of the business, information and applications.

2. Financial oriented:

This is a curious but common choice for many organisations. Organisations that feel their IT budgets are out of control appoint a financial expert as the CIO. This person feels their primary purpose is to save money, so they tend to cut things critical to an innovative organisation and ignore things that are difficult to put numbers to. They are easily manipulated by savvy vendors or internal technical staff with an agenda.

We believe cutting investment in your future is rarely good financial policy, especially in IT, where change is more rapid than any other function. The financial CIO will cut things like R&D, training, investment planning, project support, relationship and change management.

MXA knows two examples of a large SaaS provider that won lucrative contracts offering big platinum license discounts, which the financial CIO thought was a great deal. What they didn’t know, because they didn't sponsor sufficient technical leadership in their team, was that it would take more than 18 months of development for the solution to work within their environment. During this time, the multi-million-dollar license fees still had to be paid, because the vendor had negotiated with understated implementation timelines. In both cases, the platinum-level functionality wasn’t even needed by the business.

This choice of CIO will undermine the organisation's ability to seize innovation opportunities, frustrate staff to the point of leaving, and, in the end, negatively impact the bottom line.

3. Procurement oriented:

This CIO is an IT person with a strong background in procurement. Fast-changing technologies and powerful strategic partners scare this person. As a result, they tend to behave as a combination of the financial CIO and the operations CIO, locking things down to achieve control of cost and change.

This person is not a CIO. However, many organisations feel they are a good choice because they can control perceived spending excesses. Unfortunately, their strong focus on procurement means they are less well-versed in other important IT capabilities- architecture, portfolio management, cyber security, asset management, etc. Consequently they will “pull the wrong levers” to create control for your organisation, unaware of the long-term business or IT implications (and costs) of their decisions.

4. Business Oriented:

The Dunning andKrugerCIO. These appointments confidently take on a critical role without understanding the job and its importance to the business. Similar to financial CIOs, business-oriented CIOs are easily conned by in-house technical staff and vendors. As a result, many key IT investments are influenced by stakeholders (vendors and internal staff) who stand to gain personally fromthe decision without considering the organisation's needs.

Business CIOs also have no idea about critical parts of the CIO's role. For example, few understand the enormous complexity of a modern IT environment, and the very differentoperating model that is required to manage it.
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Worse, very few understand the mindset and culture of top technology talent and will drive the organisation’s IT team to a swath of mediocre managers over time. Business CIOs believe that top tech talent seek to progress their careers by managing moreand more people (like they did); they do not understand that prestige, reputationand self-esteem in technology is built by being the most skilled and knowledgeable.
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‍The most commonbusiness-oriented CIOs are health practitioners and academics. MXA'sperspective is clear: you wouldn't hire a software engineer to run a hospital,so don't hire a doctor to lead IT.

5. Development oriented:

This person has had a career in software development. They may be an expert in these capabilities but are not qualified as CIOs. They will likely see every challenge as a software development opportunity, and will argue that vendor solutions “don’t meet your organisation’s needs”. This is very frequently the wrong decision. If your organisation has built a Customer Relationship Management solution, and you are not an engineering-focused company, then you have likely met this type of CIO.
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These CIOs will look good on paper, and often, head-hunters throw a person like this into shortlists to increase their chances of the client choosing one of their recommended candidates.
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They are not a good choice for a CIO, even though their skills are valuable in other organisations like Microsoft, Google, etc, because they won't have experience in the wider challenges faced by a professional CIO. For example, in many circumstances it is better to implement a configured Software as a Service solution, and change the business processes for the “last mile”, rather than build software to match the current business process exactly.

However, the development-oriented CIO will not have the experience collaborating with the business to gain buy-in for and implement this option (neither will they suggest it in the first place).

​What Type of CIO Do You Need?