Environmental modelling of the Chief Information Officer

Since the introduction of the term in the 1980’s, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has been widely researched. Various perceptions and dimensions of the role have been explored and debated. However, the explosion in data proliferation (and the inevitable resulting information fuelled change) further complicates organisational expectations of the CIOs role. If organisations are to competitively exploit the digital trend, then those charged with recruiting and developing CIOs now need to be more effective in determining (and shaping) CIO traits and attributes, within the context of their own organisational circumstances and in line with stakeholder expectations. CIOs also need to determine their own suitability and progression within their chosen organisation if they are to remain motivated and effective. Before modelling the role of the future CIO, it is necessary to synthesise our current knowledge (and the lessons learnt) about the CIO. This paper, therefore, aims to identify and summate the spectrum of key researched ‘themes’ pertaining to the role of the CIO. Summating previous research, themes are modelled around four key CIO ‘dimensions’, namely (1) Impacting factors, (2) Controlling factors (3) Responses and (4) CIO ‘attributes’. Having modelled the CIOs current environment, and recognising the evolving IT enabled information landscape, the authors call for further research to inform the recruitment and development of the future CIO in terms of personal attributes and the measurable impact such attributes will have on their respective organisation

Developments in Practice XXXI: Social Computing: How Should It Be Managed?

Social computing, enabled by the Internet and peer-to-peer computing (P2P), is a force to be reckoned with. Today, most observers believe that the changes we’ve seen in some industries, like entertainment, is just the tip of a huge iceberg that is going to hit many different sectors. The power of social computing to disrupt the traditional business-to-customer relationship is merely one of several changes we are beginning to see in organizations. Social computing also facilitates new ways of working, learning and collaboration, which are foreign to more conventional practices but which have considerable strategic potential if they are effectively managed. Yet currently, organizations in general do not appreciate its value and strategic potential. Social computing’s promise is that technology will fit more naturally into our lives because it will adapt more readily to our locations, preferences and schedules. The challenge for organizations is to understand how to use it effectively to deliver new forms of business value. It’s easy to dismiss social computing as “just another technology fad” and most companies are approaching it very cautiously. The reality is that social computing is already a factor in organizations today even though we are still early in its evolution

The Chief of Information Offices -- performance, skills and job demands

This paper presents a research on the relationship between CIO performance and the CIO skills and CIO job demands. The CIO´s literature has many researches about the desirable or expected CIO skills, and few papers about the influence of organizational characteristics on CIO profile. The main contribution of this paper is to analyse the moderator effect of CIO job demands on the relationship between CIO skills and CIO performance. In order to describe this moderator effect, three hypothesis about the dimensions of three concepts are presented. A survey will collect the CIO perceptions about these three concepts. The collected data should be analysed by structural equation modelling