Show of Hands

Computerworld - Raise your hand if you're tired of the perpetual debate about how important the CIO role is to the business. (I'm picturing a veritable sea of hands out there.) I know I'm beyond bored with
discussions about who's got a "seat at the table" and who doesn't. I don't care if the CIO reports to the chief executive or to the CFO. And I've lost all interest in whether the top IT exec rose up through the programmer ranks or hopped a cubicle wall from the business side.
What's far more interesting are the ramifications of the expanding responsibilities of CIOs and other IT leaders. Across many industries, they're playing key roles in business process analysis, change management, regulatory compliance, product development and business project management. The evidence is mostly anecdotal, but it's a lot more compelling -- and believable -- than some survey or analyst report.
Today's CIO is just as likely to be involved in merger and acquisition discussions and new-product development meetings as the CFO or COO, says John Moon, CIO at Baxter International and one of the executives profiled in our story "The Wide-Ranging CIO" . National correspondent Julia King talked with some two-dozen CIOs and found a lot of them wandering outside the traditional boundaries of IT.
For example, at $13 billion Humana, CIO Bruce Goodman steps into a sales role when pitching investment analysts about IT's enabling role in the changing health care business. At The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, CIO Jeff Campbell is helping to re-engineer how the railroad moves freight across 33,000 miles of track. In the future, he predicts, "IT leaders will be well-respected, well-grounded business people who happen to have a second discipline called technology."
This shift in roles and responsibilities isn't limited to CIOs at large enterprises, either. Even at smaller companies like Computerworld (which is a business unit within $2.3 billion parent company IDG), our CIO, Rick Broughton, runs the IT operation, sits on corporatewide technology committees and serves as vice president of our fastest-growing business, Computerworld.com. He even copes quite graciously with a user base of high-maintenance journalists.
"The role of CIOs and other IT executives is changing (or should be changing) in many organizations to reflect our increasing reliance upon digital information for business purposes and for transactions that have profound legal and regulatory ramifications," say Randolph Kahn and Barclay T. Blair in their new book, Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance (AIIM, 2004). They argue convincingly that the job of managing