Don Philmlee

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “first we kill all the CIOs”. All hackneyed phrases aside, we may not need to do anything of the kind. It appears we are running out of CIOs. Will we run out of qualified Chief Information Officers anytime soon? I never would have thought that was the case, but Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems at the University of Maryland, and Cynthia Beath, professor emeritus of information management at the University of Texas at Austin think so.

They interviewed corporate executives and recruiting firms and found that although CIOs are in growing demand, the pool of qualified candidates is not growing. Their report, “Grooming the 2010 CIO,” was written for the Society for Information Management Advanced Practices Council and reviews how companies can address this CIO shortage by grooming future leaders from within.

Their research, detailed in article today on CIO Insight says that the CIO of 2010 will be more of a leader than a manager and more of a business expert than technical expert. Active learning, formal training, coaching and mentoring are important steps in the development of CIO candidates.
One executive search firm indicated that new CIO candidates are emerging from the middle ranks of the IT consulting firms.
Good news for those of us in the consulting business!