Someone responded to one of my recent posts about what I think the profile of the “new CIO” should look like, and it made me rethink my argument. My original point was that one of the biggest needs in an IT organization today is the ability to move an organization from one state to another — and to do it quickly. That requires a CIO who is decisive and entrepreneurial. Someone who can make decisions with the information available, take action and adjust, while still making sure the right risk management, controls, security and governance are in place.

Someone challenged me on that. His argument was that an HR leader with a strong organizational change management background could have many of those same skills. If transformational change is what matters most, how important is the technology background? Another response was that I was oversimplifying the CIO role because there are so many other things a CIO needs to know how to do.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized he was 100% right. But it actually brought me back to the same conclusion in a different way.

The transformation doesn't really stop anymore

The problem today isn't just that CIOs need to manage transformation. It's that the transformation never really stops.

AI is the obvious example. A business function can find an AI tool today, try it tomorrow and want to deploy it next week. Meanwhile, IT is trying to figure out security, data privacy, architecture, integration, contracts, compliance and whether it fits into the broader technology environment.

Those are legitimate concerns. But this is where IT risks becoming a roadblock to the innovation it is supposed to enable. The answer can't always be, “Wait. We need six months to evaluate this.” But it also can't be, “Sure, everyone go use whatever AI tools you want.”

The CIO has to figure out how to do both: move fast and maintain control. Experiment and manage risk. Give people autonomy while maintaining an enterprise architecture. Make decisions before all the information is available while understanding the consequences of being wrong.

And do all of that while the technology itself keeps changing.

What happens when the company changes faster than its CIO?

Maybe this is part of the reason I feel like I am seeing so many “Confidential CIO” searches lately. Obviously, there are many reasons an executive search can be confidential, and I don't know what is happening inside any particular company. But it has made me wonder: what happens when a company is changing faster than its CIO?

What happens when the business wants to move faster and experiment more, but technology keeps saying no, not yet, or “we need to study this”? Eventually, what was supposed to protect the company can start to feel like it is standing in the company's way. And if leadership doesn't think the CIO can make that transition, they may start looking for someone who can.

This also brings me back to something from my original post. I don't necessarily think a resume filled with CIO titles is always the best indicator of the CIO a company should hire. That person may be an outstanding executive, but they may also have become extremely good at managing a particular kind of transformation — taking companies public, preparing for M&A, commercializing products, scaling globally or reducing costs.

There is absolutely a need for those people. But companies don't stay in one stage forever. An early-stage company becomes a late-stage company. Then it commercializes. Maybe it expands globally, goes public or makes an acquisition. Or the pipeline changes and suddenly a growth strategy becomes a cost-containment strategy.

Every one of those changes creates a different technology problem and a different organizational problem. Because IT touches almost every business function, the CIO has to understand not only how the technology needs to change, but how the company itself needs to operate differently.

So what experience prepares someone for that?

I keep coming back to five things.

1. Experience in a large, mature organization — and strong business knowledge. You need to understand what “good” looks like at scale: how mature organizations operate, how finance and governance work, how decisions get made and how risk gets managed. This is also where I think an MBA or similar business background can be valuable. A CIO needs to understand the business, not just the technology supporting it.

2. Consulting experience. Consulting teaches you to walk into organizations you don't know, with different cultures, personalities, technologies and politics, and figure things out quickly. You have to listen, understand the problem, build credibility and start creating value. That becomes pretty useful when your own company keeps changing around you.

3. Enough technology experience to know when something doesn't make sense. The CIO doesn't need to be the smartest technologist in the room. They should hire people who know far more about specific technologies. But they need enough depth in architecture, data, integration, cybersecurity, infrastructure and AI to ask good questions and recognize when today's easy solution is creating tomorrow's big problem.

4. Leadership and developing people. My friend Shawn O'Hagan reminded me of this one. None of the other four matter much if you can't lead people. You have to understand people's strengths, develop them, give them ownership and empower them to make decisions. A fast organization can't have a CIO who needs to approve everything.

5. Entrepreneurial experience. This is still the one I think gets underestimated. Build something. Launch a product. Try to sell it. Do it without enough money. Make decisions without enough information. Discover that something you were convinced customers wanted isn't actually what they wanted — and change it.

In a startup, you don't get to stay in your lane. You're involved in product, technology, customers, finance, marketing, operations and strategy because somebody has to be. You experience an enormous amount of organizational change in a very compressed period of time. I think that experience is increasingly valuable for a CIO.

Maybe it's not a “transformational CIO”

So I still come back to my original premise, although I would describe it a little differently now. Maybe the most important characteristic of the contemporary CIO isn't being a transformational CIO. Maybe it's being an adaptable CIO.

If you specifically need someone to prepare your company for M&A, take it public or dramatically reduce costs, go find the person who has done exactly that three times. But if you're looking for someone who can evolve with the company, move quickly, make an immediate impact and then become a different kind of CIO two years from now because the company needs something completely different, I'd look beyond how many times “CIO” appears on the resume.

I'd look for those five things: large-company business experience, consulting, technology, leadership and entrepreneurship.

Because maybe the most important question when hiring a CIO isn't:

“Have you done exactly what we need right now?”

It's:

“Can you become the CIO we're going to need next?”