The New CIO: From Information to Innovation and Survival

Most mid- to large-size companies have a CIO, but very few have a CIO. Let me explain.

We know the CIO as the Chief Information Officer. He or she owns the corporation's IT operation, infrastructure, budget, staff, mission, and the gaggle of headaches that comes along with it. In the heyday of the IBM mainframe systems running COBOL code on OS/MVS or VSE, we knew this person as the MIS Director.

But times change. CIO over the last five years gradually has taken on a new meaning: Chief Innovation Officer.

This new CIO is fundamentally different from the typical C-level manager. The key is that the Innovation Officer works not "in" the business, but rather "on" the business. The difference is enormous.

Working "in" your business puts you in the trenches, dealing with today's fires and preventing tomorrow's. It may be going on sales calls to help close a deal. It's often watching the budget and striving to get the most out of each dollar that goes out the door. It's keeping the gears well-greased and the trains running on time.

But what it is not, is developing a vision for what the business should look like five or 10 years into the future, how the business must evolve and re-invent itself, or predicting what current offerings are likely to become irrelevant years hence. Enter the Chief Innovation Officer.

In a forum to discuss health on America's growing obesity plague, the Chief Innovation Officer of a major soft-drink manufacturer acknowledged that his corporation had a responsibility not just to its consumers but to society at large. The corporation recognized that as it grew, it needed to become a leader and recognize its "responsibility to raise awareness and respond to the key issues of obesity and health that are facing our consumers, and in a very real sense affecting the health of nations." Pretty heady stuff for a purveyor of caramel-colored candy sugar water.

To grow, this company adopted radical thinking that seems in direct opposition to its historic line of business.

Consider another example, one within our industry. I've written about them before, but printer maker Lexmark is carving out new business opportunities by showing its customers that they can print less and save money. The idea would seem to be heresy for a printer maker, in direct opposition to its own reason for being in business in the first place. But by developing products and server-based applications that support scan-to-email, electronic document management, and dozens of other image-based (meaning "paperless") vertical-market applications, the company is finding new opportunities.

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