Gartner: CIOs need business experience

A new Gartner report says that current CIOs need to learn other skills outside of technology. And this should be the year that they begin acquiring non-IT business management skills to keep pace with their changing world. "For the past few years we have detected some intriguing CIO hiring trends: CIO candidates are not required to have formal technology-oriented backgrounds but they must be able to show that they have managed a non-IT business unit," says Ken McGee, a Gartner analyst. "Professional qualifications and competence are still necessary for those wanting to become CIOs, but these qualities will not be sufficient in coming years." There are two reasons for this:

• New CIOs need non-IT, business unit executive experience if they wish to get a new CIO job.
• New, non-IT duties are being given to more and more 'new' CIOs.

To confirm these trends, Gartner spoke with the heads of IT recruitment at four of the largest professional search firms in the world. They were asked whether their companies were looking for specific education and technical knowledge. The answer was very instructive:"When push comes to shove, it doesn't matter," one executive told Gartner.

Instead, executives want candidates who have management experience and CIOs who have run departments outside of IT. "We have discovered that leading recruitment executives report business unit management experience to be an actual requirement of chief executives looking for CIOs," McGee said. "The ability to leverage technology for competitive advantage ­to innovate, ­that is really where the sweet spot is," says one recruiter.

For more on the changing CIO skills:
- See this Computing SA article