What Does the CIO Do?

Business and technology are ever-changing — your IT plan should, too. The fact is, technology today helps make every other function in your business more effective and efficient, which also increases the revenue each employee can support. 

You’ve heard of the C-suite title of Chief Information Officer (CIO), but you may not employ one – or even if you do – you may not be entirely aligned with their key roles and responsibilities.  

So, What Does the CIO Do? 

The CIO is responsible for the IT and computer systems that support enterprise goals. The CIO's job is to innovate, collaborate, balance the IT budget and motivate IT staff. 

Watch now: Who is the Fractional CIO? 

Key Responsibilities of the CIO 

• Manages IT staff and develops department goals: Too often, companies stop at department goals around uptime and response time. While good, these goals support a tactical approach rather than a strategic one. There should be additional foundational goals around creating a quiet, predictable, secure IT environment, free of disruptions and changes that slow your people down. A good metric is once you add up all the monthly support, change and alerts, there should be at least 5x that many people in your company. So, for a 40-person company, a truly quiet, predictable, secure IT environment should only have eight support, change and alert tickets combined per month at maximum. Every ticket more than that costs your company more in overhead in terms of IT people needed to solve the issues and in terms of the rest of your staff, from all the disruptions to getting their work done.

• Develops and oversees the IT budget: The CIO manages the IT budget your team helps put into place and asks questions like, "Does your budget include the most important things that need to happen in the coming year?" This way, the budget is managed throughout the year while eliminating surprises.

• Plans, deploys and maintains IT systems and operations: The CIO maintains or improves systems and IT operations to maximize performance.

• Manages the organization's software development needs: The CIO manages software packages and helps to determine whether the benefits outweigh the cost of pursuing customization over software that is otherwise available in the market.

• Develops IT policies and procedures: Having IT policies that outline your specific technology approaches helps to ensure consistency and that your procedures support them. For example, what is your remote access policy? What is your backup and disaster recovery policy? What is your physical access policy?

• Stays updated on IT trends and emerging technologies: The CIO assesses what current technology is going away, what current technology will be around for the life of the investment and what new technology is coming that you should pursue or wait for.

• Develops and enforces IT best practices: The CIO considers how each piece of hardware and software should be set up so that it is issue-free, intuitive to use, secure and helps your people be the most productive. How do you stay up to date as business and technology change, and how do you ensure those best practices are put in place and remain there?

• Ensures IT strategies and processes support company-wide goals: Does the direction you are headed with your IT investments best support the current and future direction of your company? This includes not only products but people and processes. Are your IT people spending their time in areas with positive ROI for your business over the sunk cost of running the day-to-day?

• Oversees relationships with vendors, contractors and service providers: Are you looking for vendors or partners? This could be a whole topic on its own here, but we see two distinct approaches here. Should your goal be to only have one egg per basket, and so split up each need into the simplest commodity and find the lowest cost provider? Or should your goal be to find partners who sit on the same side of the table as us, go deeper, understand your business and can drive more value?

• Explains to the other executives the benefits and risks of new IT-related projects: The CIO collaborates with all the other departments in the company, understanding their needs and goals. They ensure the right technology is in place to support them, that IT is seen by all department heads as a partner, further enabling their own department's success, and that the changes made are the right changes for the entire business.

  
  

How Should Your Business Leverage the CIO?

You need an IT leader who strategically understands your business and technology – not a manager or director but the CIO. The CIO needs to be strategically guiding and directing all things technology. Hardware, software, business applications and services all must work together for your business, or you end up overspending on people or technology. 

• The CIO holds recurring monthly IT steering meetings with all functional business leaders to evaluate the existing IT plan against the changing business needs, to ensure they are still the top priorities and to identify new business needs to explore in the future. 
• The CIO builds the IT plan and quantifies initiatives in business terms. For example, how many hours they could save the business a month, or how much revenue is at risk. 
• The CIO analyzes how each of the other business functions work, identifying new productivity initiatives to consider that would further support your business plan.
• The CIO informs you of new risks to the business based on an in-depth analysis of your current technology footprint and areas outside of IT best practices.  

Every Thriveon client gains a dedicated Fractional CIO to lead their IT strategy and plan. Contact us today with questions or to get started on your new IT strategy.