The "New CIO" Rant

Writing and posting this on LinkedIn is risky for my career, but at this point, I think it needs to be said. Claude also told me not to post this, at least not in this tone. But whatever. 

For the second time in two months, I was the runner-up for a CIO or VP of IT position at a great company. Both companies were willing to share why they went with “the other guy,” which I appreciated, even if I didn’t love the answer:

When two candidates are well qualified for a senior role, the person with the more predictable experience seems to win over the person whose career has taken a less conventional path.

Granted, I’m probably biased. But especially now, with AI forcing companies to rethink how they operate, I believe you actually want a CIO or VP of IT with diverse experience. Seeing “CIO” listed over and over down a résumé shouldn’t automatically make someone the better choice. I can only speak to life sciences because that’s what I know, but I suspect this applies elsewhere.

When I look at my LinkedIn feed, there is no shortage of CIO or VP of IT openings. New ones pop up daily. I wasn’t seeing this a few years ago. So why are so many organizations looking for a new or replacement CIO? And are they looking for the experience that will actually solve their problems?

I reviewed the latest five CIO job postings in my feed and the requirements were fairly standard and consistent:

• Align technology investments with organizational strategy. Basically, strategic planning, financial management, and enterprise architecture. Have the data to back up investment decisions and make sure the budget supports where the company is going.

• Turn AI and data into practical value. Honestly, this overlaps heavily with the first point. But it has “AI” in it, so it gets its own line. Yes, there are new vendors, new risks, and changes to how you implement and govern AI technology. The expectation that technology should deliver business value is hardly new.

• Unify efforts across departments. Facilitate cross-functional projects and technology implementations, because technology and business processes don’t stay neatly inside departmental boundaries.

• Manage the risks and investments that come with technology changes. Know how to introduce change so investments deliver their intended benefits, whether that means new revenue, productivity, or risk reduction. Governance and controls are part of that work.

Read those requirements and tell me how much of the job depends on knowing every vendor, software platform or detailed business process. You need enough technical depth to make sound decisions, but the landscape is changing so quickly with agentic AI and new vendors. An encyclopedic knowledge of yesterday’s platforms and "best practice" business processes only gets you so far.

You absolutely need strong business knowledge. But a CFO has that too. With the right team, a CFO or another experienced business leader could probably handle much of what those postings describe as the “new CIO” role.

That’s what frustrates me about these searches. The standard responsibilities are clear. What’s harder to find in the job description, and apparently harder to recognize in a candidate, is the ability to do all of the typical CIO stuff WHILE moving fast.

An experienced CIO should know how to establish an IT operating model as Gartner has many times defined, manage cross-functional work, implement technologies, and track operations with metrics and dashboards. There are established enterprise architecture frameworks and governance models to draw from. These aren’t unsolved problems.

The harder problem is how to deliver those responsibilities while innovating, iterating, making decisions, and adapting quickly.

IT is often called a roadblock or criticized for being slow to respond. Some of that comes with the territory: risk matters, and cross-functional work is complicated. But those complexities aren’t going away, and neither is the pressure to move faster. You need someone who can work through them without letting every decision grind to a halt.

My argument is that the CIO’s responsibilities haven’t necessarily changed all that much. The profile of the person you hire needs to change.

You need someone who can take feedback, give it directly, resolve conflict quickly, and build a team that can adapt. Someone who can make a decision with incomplete information, learn from the result, and change course when needed.

You need a SEAL Team Six mentality: read the situation, react, make decisions, execute, and debrief afterward. That takes practice. I don’t think a career spent moving from one corporate CIO position to another automatically provides it.

So what would I look for in a résumé or LinkedIn profile? Four types of experience:

1. Corporate Business experience. Someone who understands what each business function does, how the functions work together, and where the usual conflicts arise. They need to know how to operate inside a corporation, navigate its decision-making, and get things done across departments. An MBA is a useful addition because it gives that experience a grounding in established business practices.

2. Consulting experience. Exposure to different companies, sizes, cultures, and people. There is real value in having to figure out how to accomplish something in an organization that operates nothing like the last one you worked with. You learn quickly that the same approach doesn’t work everywhere.

3. A technology background. Enough depth to understand data governance and integrity, recognize the difference between poor architecture and something that can scale, and assess technology and cybersecurity risks. You don’t have to be the deepest technical expert in the room. You do need to understand what your experts are telling you and know which questions to ask.

4. Entrepreneurial experience. Someone who has built a product, brought it to market, and had to sell it. There is a lot to learn when you’re responsible for whether a business actually makes money. You learn to be scrappy, work with limited budgets, test assumptions, and change direction quickly when things aren’t working. You also learn that you can’t spend six months making every decision.

That fourth point deserves a lot more credit than I think it gets.

Why would a pharma or biotech company question someone taking a few years to build an AI technology company outside healthcare? That experience requires exactly the speed, judgment, and willingness to learn that companies say they want. Building something yourself forces you to deal with the consequences of your decisions, often immediately.

And yes, I’m frustrated that my deep experience in biotech and pharma didn’t get me a CIO position at a healthcare company. I see real value in bringing experience from the companies that develop therapies into the organizations that deliver care.

I would have more to learn about healthcare management. Of course I would. That experience would also make me a better leader if I later returned to pharma or biotech. In the meantime, the healthcare company would get someone with strong regulatory and controls experience, along with a different perspective on operations, efficiency, and commercial marketing.

That seems like a useful exchange. Yet when the final decision comes, the familiar background seems to carry more weight.

I understand why a company chooses the candidate whose experience maps neatly to the role. It’s easier to explain and probably feels safer. But if you’re hiring because your organization needs to change, I think you should question how much weight you’re putting on a career that looks exactly like the one you expected.

So there’s my rant.

Do you think a different profile is better suited to the CIO role today? With the impact of AI, what experience and characteristics should companies actually be hiring for?