In our last newsletter we discussed the role of the CIO and looked at whether or not the CIO is an innovative, strategic thinker who is closely aligned with their company's senior business and functional managers. The discussion was based on our survey of 243 IT professionals as well as on an interview that we conducted with the CIO of a major financial institution. In general the survey data and the interview supported the notion that more often than not CIOs are strategic thinkers who have done a good job of aligning themselves with their company's senior business and functional managers. Having established that, we will use this newsletter to explore whether or not CIOs actually get their hands dirty with operations.

We asked the survey respondents if they agreed with the statement that their CIO has a strong focus on operational issues such as assuring availability and minimizing cost. Roughly three-quarters of the respondents agreed at least somewhat with that statement.

We interviewed a network tools architect who stated that the degree to which his CIO is focused on operational issues “depends upon whether or not it is a huge issue that only he can decide”. He added that cost control is only a moderately important issue in his organization. In contrast to that statement, an enterprise networks manager whom we interviewed stated that his CIO spends 90% of his time on cost-cutting activities. He added that in order to achieve cost savings his CIO has driven initiatives such as data center consolidation. Previous newsletters have address the fact that data center consolidation can have a major impact on a company’s WAN.

The CIO we interviewed said that when he first arrived at the company where he currently works he spent 80% of his time on operational issues. This approach was necessitated by the fact that the company was experiencing an unacceptable level of outages in some of its core applications. Now that the availability issues have been resolved, the CIO spends roughly 20% of his time on operational issues. He added that the percentage of time that he spends on operational issues varies by business unit based on their level of business and IT maturity.

In the next newsletter we will continue to explore the role of the CIO. In the meantime, more information on this topic can be found in this briefing. Also, if you are going to be at the Interop conference in NYC in September, Jim will be moderating a roundtable discussion at the conference with three CIOs on both their role as well as the evolving role of the IT organization.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.