How the CIO spends his / her time

While reading an interesting article on business transformation and the CIO role, I came to some clear statistics about what a CIO does in a day and how to categorize those activities (putting a name on the stuff helps, most of the time at least, to have a clear understanding and a very clear explanation when you have to explain it to someone else). Here are the categories (all credits go to the CIO Executive Council):

1/ CIO as business strategist spends time on:
  • Developing and refining business strategy
  • Studying market trends/customer needs to identify commercial opportunities
  • Driving business innovation
  • Identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation
  • Developing new go-to-market strategies & technologies
2/ Modern CIO's also have a transformational role to fulfill:
  • Redesigning business processes
  • Aligning IT initiatives with business goals
  • Cultivating the IT/business partnership
  • Leading change efforts
  • Implementing new systems and architecture
3/ ...and, last but not least, a functional role:
  • Managing IT crises
  • Negotiating with IT vendors
  • Improving IT operations/systems performance
  • Security management
  • Cost control/expense management
The remaining one billion question is what comes first 😃

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