Skills for the CIO Class of 2015, Peter High featured in CIO article

IT management is changing. Here are some of the types of experience and knowledge that companies will be looking for in their CIOs.

by Martha Heller, in CIO

05-30-2012

Excerpt from the article:

In 2015, what skills will appear on job descriptions for Fortune 500 CIOs? I asked Peter High, author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs, for a list of requirements.

First there are the table stakes. These start, High says, with an undergraduate degree in engineering or computer science. While there are a growing number of CIOs with liberal arts backgrounds, they’re still in the minority, he points out. And while a CIO doesn’t have to have spent all of their career in IT, they do need some experience managing the IT function–recently, given how dynamic technology is.

Other table stakes include:

• Vendor management experience, with at least some knowledge of how to develop outsourcing contracts that can be undone.
• A solid understanding of governance, for handling increasingly complex teams with internal and external resources. “CIOs need a solid background in the use of development lifecycles, [project management offices], and other key governance practices,” High says.
• Financial expertise, from understanding the ROI on technology investments to knowing how amortization schedules change with cloud computing.
• Team leadership skills, including the humility to surround yourself with people smarter than you are and the foresight to groom your successors.

To read the remainder of this article, please visit CIO.

To read another article by Martha Heller, in which she talks about how she uses World Class IT for CIO evaluations, please click here.