Are You Having a CIO Identity Crisis?

Attention members of the C-suite: Your CIO is having an identity crisis. And it’s your fault.

That’s what you’d hear if you could be a bug on the wall at a CIO convention. What do they want me to do? Oil the machines? Contribute to strategy? Take charge of business processes? Save money? Please the customer? Lead innovation? And may I please have a seat at the table?

Although indecision over roles in the organization can be blamed, this is ultimately the result of the global information age economy in which knowledge determines the winner. Who in your company is responsible for the information? Is it the CIO because his or her title has the word “information” in it?

The latest manifestation of this identity crisis is what the pundits have labeled “CIO 2.0,” as though version 1.0 had been nailed and everyone was on board with it. The truth is, CIO 2.0 can mean anything and everything. On one end of the spectrum, it can refer to a superhero rescuing the organization from certain death. On the other, it can mean master of the latest generation of technology tools known as Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is as amorphous a concept as CIO 2.0. It refers to new Web-based applications─blogs, wikis, social networks and the like–that make it easy for people to create and share information. And now, it is said, the enterprise should embrace these, and this, too, has a name: Enterprise 2.0.