: What makes a CIO job the most volatile, high-turnover job in business? How important is CIO leadership for the future success of companies?
A: Early in our careers at the Harvard Business School, we discovered that the turnover of CIOs ran at around 30 to 40 percent per year. As a result of our research, we described the driving cause as the rapid change of IT through the operation of Moore's Law (IT cost halving every 18 months or so), which we thought would be short-lived. But when we looked at the turnover rates again a few years later, we discovered the rate was about the same, but the driving cause was more than just the rapid change in IT: It was also because IT was the nexus of major organizational change, the key enabler of business process redesign.
Over the years, the CIO job has remained a hot seat in business and has, in turn, become a key management position in executing a company's competitive cost structure and strategy. It has become a key senior management position that can enable companies to transform their twentieth-century industrial organization structures to twenty-first-century information-based organization structures.
Q: In your novel, though Barton had been willing to critique his predecessor for constantly fighting fires, he found himself facing the same dilemmas. Did it actually help him as CIO to know relatively little about IT?
A: Among a few key differences between the management styles of Jim Barton (trained as a general manager) and his predecessor Bill Davies (trained as an IT specialist), the most important is arguably in their approach to managing relationships. Davies focused where he was strongest—on his relationship to the IT department—and tended to retreat into the IT "basement" in times of conflict with business units and senior management. Barton paid attention to his staff, while at the same time more effectively