The company is at a precipice. Market share is eroding, the economy is down, and there is an urgent need to cut costs. There are a number of key projects on the table, any one of which could result in a big revenue upside. The CEO calls the team together – the CFO, COO, and head of Sales and Marketing are all there. If they plan a downsizing, HR may even be involved. The team gets to work.

But where is the CIO? Eventually, everything the company decides to do will have an IT component to it, short of balance sheet reengineering. You can’t even fire someone without IT (you need to lock the exited employee out of the network).

The answer in most companies is that the CIO is not part of the senior team and is not valued as a member of the inner circle. CIOs are the “dialtone executives.” That is, when everything is going fine, you tend not to notice them. It’s only when things screw up that they are on everyone’s mind.

A survey of CEOs not too long ago revealed that if the CEO wanted to improve their CIO relationship, they would sooner get a new CIO than invest in improving the current one. You know what? I bet that’s how you got your last CIO. You know what else? I bet that this new one will come in, clean up what they find, and then sink into complacency in the back waters of executive mindshare till the CEO wakes up and once again decides they need someone who thinks like they do. The average lifetime of a CIO is three years, leading to the axiom that CIO stands for “Career Is Over.”

So if this can all be seen so clearly, why does it keep happening? I’d like to think it’s because your CEO doesn’t read my blog, but it’s more likely a function of misaligned expectations at the beginning of the relationship. (Just in case I’m wrong, feel free to forward them a link to the blog.)

I believe the genesis of the problem is that the CIO role is rooted in domain knowledge, and that this domain is far afield from any domain the CEO hangs out in. The typical CIO has come up through the ranks of IT operations and development. Sometimes they have some consulting thrown in as well. They are well-prepared to step in and get things done but ill-suited to hang with the team and discuss working capital and segment penetration. Moreover, executive teams are typically not thoughtful about integrating a new member like this. More often, it’s “Who can get to work fastest?”

Perversely, the most successful CIOs are the ones who come from the business and remain aloof from the details of IT. Sure, they will go deep to make sure the right things are being done and to get to know their teams, but at the end of the day they come back up and stay part of the business.

This is really a problem for CIOs who are brought in to fix deep technical problems in a fractious organization. They go deep and stay involved till other leadership can be put in place for day-to-day operations. By this time, the inner-circle train has left the station. If the CIO was brought on to oversee Operations, then it was never expected that they would take a seat at the table in the first place. Eventually, any CIO left in place long enough ends up focusing on improving Operations, since they have little else to work on. They become protective of it and thus become a barrier to rapid change.

It does hurt companies to be so blinkered about excluding the CIO. Outside of the CFO and HR, the CIO is possibly the only person with a view of the entire company and certainly the only one with a process and system view of it. CIOs also regularly talk to their peers and compare notes. They have a good idea of how you are doing and where the Easter eggs are buried. Do you think your senior team would be threatened by a person like this? Most are.

Sure, it’s up to the CIO to transcend their geek roots and learn to hang with the business, learn how to be smart and not threatening, learn how to “eat their own young” and outsource, for example. It’s also up to the business to figure out how to bring the CIO in. One of the best ways is to give them P&L for something. That way, they can’t just sit at the table and look smug.

At the end of the day, it is up to the CEO to remember why they brought the CIO on and that the company will profit from involvement. CEOs need to look beyond the project the CIO was hired for and think about them as a part of their team. It’s a dynamic tension, but one that is best maintained for the good of the company. ###