Why the CIO role should be split in two

What do the chief digital officer, chief technology officer, chief information security officer, chief transformation officer, chief data officer, and so on, have in common?

All their responsibilities were previously owned by one person: the CIO.

The CIO role today is increasingly being cloned and divided up into multiple mini-CIO roles. It’s to the point where you can hardly define what each of these high-powered executives is responsible for and where their clear lines of ownership are. In fact, some of these divisions strike me as frankly a bit artificial.

Is this phenomenon a failure of the CIO or that the expectations of the role have grown exponentially? I believe both are true.

Rise of the CIO clones

In my view, the CIO should be under the microscope as their role is being split into more and more silos. At the same time, there is an outcry to have more of these roles report directly to the CEO.

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