CIO Wisdom: Best Practices from Silicon Valley's Leading IT Experts

Chapter 1. Within and Beyond: Understanding the Role of the CIO

By Stuart Robbins and Al Pappas

Bringing a variety of special skills and experiences, Stuart Robbins and Al Pappas provide two perspectives on the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in business today. Each expresses a unique view of what it means to be a CIO.

The CIO is a relatively new executive management position in many organizations. Introduced in the early 1980s to address the special needs of enterprises in maintaining the critical IT infrastructures that support their business processes, the CIO’s role has grown in importance as it has evolved through the 1990s and into the new millennium.

In the previous decade, a major CIO role shift was needed to address ...