Many organisations are looking to CIO’s to become change agents in the organisation. But is this the best use of the skills of the person in this role – or indeed, as in many cases, does the CIO have the right skills for this job.

CIO’s are commonly joint CTO / CIO’s, with already overloaded schedules managing the best deployment of resources within their limited budgets and staff. Keeping up with technology strategy and maintaining a roadmap of implementation to keep the enterprise on par with others in the industry is challenging enough.

My position on where BI stands has been made clear in many previous articles. Business intelligence is NOT a CIO /CTO role. However, building the architecture [data and technical] does fall within the realm of this position.

The head of BI needs to not only be a visionary, they need to be a good influencer and change agent. They need to be able to put the value of business intelligence into context with thier unique enterprise and to be able to negotiate equally with business executives and IT managers.

Once the business accepts the value of BI, the CBIO must then work closely with the CIO/CTO to develop a technology and data management roadmap that fits in with other IT initiatives. This will also include an assessment of current skills that may be available in the organisation that meet the unique requirements of BI, rather than corporate IT. Business processes, and corporate performance capability [such as decision making] help drive these decisions that the CIO will need to make in terms of extensions and enhancements to infrastructure. The CBIO is the one that can provide the information necessary.

Educating the organization is essential is an essential first step in BI, and fostering strong collaboration between the business and IT is vital to long term success.

Whilst I have read in many articles that make statements such as  “having a CIO who can lead the implementation of a pervasive BI strategy is vital to the organization’s success” I rebuke this statement and instead suggest, keeping BI out of the IT department and having a CIO that can work with a BI specialist ……..is vital to the success of BI, and the organisation.