This is the third in a series of newsletters that looks at the overall role of the CIO. We have based this series in part on a survey that we gave to 243 IT professionals as well as interviews that we conducted with a network tools architect, an enterprise networks manager and a CIO. We are going to use this newsletter to look at the role that the CIO plays relative to leveraging technology for business value.

We asked the survey respondents if they agreed with the statement that their CIO has a strong grasp of technology and how technology can be used to drive business value. Two-thirds of the respondents agree at least somewhat with that statement. However, the interviews that we conducted produced a range of views on how much of a grasp the typical CIO has on technology and its business use.

For example, the network tools architect stated that his CIO is relatively technically savvy but that “We do not get any earth shattering direction directly from him.” He added that the good CIOs “know what they don’t know” and that even if a CIO was highly technical at one time, they have been out of the technical realm for so long that they no longer are. The enterprise networks manager stated that his CIO has a lot of experience as a software developer and his technical background was one of the primary reasons that he was hired.

The CIO stated that he regards himself as a business leader who manages technology and that his approach is that any IT expenditure has to have business value. He agreed with the conventional wisdom that after the dot com implosion that IT was seen as having little direct business value but he believes that that view of IT is changing. According to the CIO we are at a turning point in terms of how the customer gets supported. He added that this type of work used to be very people intensive, but that at an increasing rate this work is being automated and the allowable business processes are determined by the business rules inside of the relevant enterprise applications. As such, business and IT professionals need a higher level of understanding of the applications than was previously necessary. The CIO also stated that he has adopted an approach that was first stated by one of his company’s senior managers. That approach is that “There is no such thing as an IT project, just business projects that have a business component.”

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