Special issue on the evolution of the CIO role: past and future perspectives

Articles in this special issue address the evolution of the CIO role during the past and predict drivers for change in the future. This Janus approach is well-represented by an in-depth study of the IT leader's role over more than forty years at Texaco and by a study using interviews with over fifty IT leaders about the "future of in-house IT organizations."

The enthralling Texaco study should be required reading for all IS graduate students. As a saga of our profession's history and the evolution of the CIO role, this article provides a painful, personal view of IT leaders' struggle to gain recognition for the IT function's real contributions. "The Evolution of the Corporate IT Function and the Role of the CIO at Texaco -- How do Perceptions of IT's Performance Get Formed?" (Hirscheim, Porra, Parks) questions a basic assumption of prior research, that the IT function and the CIO have failed in some way: failed to establish a relationship with top management, failed to demonstrate value, failed to improve the performance of the organization, failed to provide an IT vision or link that vision to the organization's strategy.

This longitudinal study demonstrates clearly that "Texaco's IT function did a stellar job," and that the "small investment in IT was put to an increasingly effective use at a staggering rate." CIOs or IT leaders have been effective at Texaco, some amazingly so. Yet during all these years from 1957 on, there was not a time when "top management or users expressed their satisfaction with the IT function." The authors conclude that "top management perceptions of the IT leaders' and IT functions' performance developed in a vacuum."

Applying Peppard and Ward's perceptions gap categories, Hirscheim, Porra, and Parks call into question the very questions which have been asked in IT leadership research, and offer some new directions. Interestingly, the authors posit that charge back systems which reflect cost but not contribution and which are accumulated in overhead accounts may be the "most consequential mistake the IT profession has made so far."

The perception gap is also a theme in Reich and Nelson's "In Their Own Words: CIO Visions about the Future of In-House IT Organizations." They conducted interviews with fifty CIOs and IT leaders in twenty-two organizations. As the technology has become more complex, user expectations have become very high: "Expectation is instantaneous delivery at zero cost, with zero bugs and zero defects." Their findings are presented in two sections: "Drivers of change" and "Transitions in in-house IT organizations." The richness of experience and insights into the future revealed by the authors' analyses of these fifty interviews is rare. Quotations selected for inclusion are memorable: "the IT workforce are the coal workers of the 21st century."

Primary future trends are projected and leading research opportunities identified. Some interesting subsidiary future trends also emerge: systems analysts in-house providing requirement for outsourced development, a natural evolution toward "a significant increase in telecommuting," consulting as a career path for aspiring CIOs, the importance of the transition from individual-based IT work to team-based work and mindset, the need for both a CTO and CIO as complementary functions. Reich and Nelson's in-depth view of the evolution of the CIO role and the IT function should help academic research to "lead practice rather than follow it."