2024 CIO Hall of Fame inductees on the future of the CIO role

Like most modern CIOs, Sathish Muthukrishnan has seen the list of responsibilities for the top IT position expand; his title — chief information, data, and digital officer — reflects that expansion.

As the IT chief at Ally Financial, and one of this year’s 10 CIO Hall of Fame inductees, Muthukrishnan says the position has evolved into one that is now “a strategic partner for the enterprise.”

“Reporting to the CEO and a member of the company’s executive committee, my role is deep and broad — product, user experience, data, digital, tech delivery, security, network, and operations,” he says.

The ongoing expansion of CIO duties also has changed what constitutes success for the role. Measures of success are shifting away from operational metrics such as uptime to those focused on organizational goals.

“My professional journey has instilled in me the importance of driving value for the business. It’s not merely about adopting technology for its own sake but rather making a meaningful difference for your organization,” Muthukrishnan says.

An increasingly business-centric role

Muthukrishnan’s career highlights demonstrate that shift.

As chief digital and information officer at Honeywell Aerospace, he helped transform the company’s 10,000-plus global engineering organization and its used serviceable airline parts into a blockchain-powered digital business. As CIO of enterprise digital at American Express, he helped pioneer digital transformation and launched several industry-first digital products. He and his colleagues have generated more than 30 patents in the manufacturing, payments, and digital technology categories.

Muthukrishnan says the chance to make such marks for the business is what attracted him to the CIO job.

“This role ignites a superpower to see around corners for emerging tech and identify opportunities to amplify delivery. It offers the responsibility and ability to impact the entire company, and positively influence both internal and external customers. In short, connecting dots,” he says.

For CIOs who like that, there’s good news, as the Hall of Famers see much more of that work on the horizon.

“As technology has advanced, the opportunity has increased, too,” he says, adding that moving forward “the best candidates [for CIO jobs] will be technologists who can connect the dots, understand businesses, as well as appreciate and articulate customer needs.

Muthukrishnan’s IT career, which started some three decades ago as a software engineer, overlaps with the rise of the CIO position and its evolution from a job focused almost exclusively on making sure the technology runs to an executive-level post responsible for ensuring that the business runs.

Of course, the responsibility for efficiently and effectively running IT will continue as a bedrock of the CIO role as it moves into the future; in fact, it’s a responsibility that has become increasingly critical as digital organizations cannot operate without technology — they can’t revert back to manual operations in an emergency, as none exist.

That said, however, the members of the 2024 Hall of Fame cohort believe CIOs will continue accumulating both more business responsibilities and more business power in the upcoming years.

And those changes will shape the dominant skills that CIOs will need, the tasks they’ll have, possibly their place in the org chart and, as Muthukrishnan shows, their titles.

Visionaries driving the business agenda

“It is clear that as IT has become a critical driver and as every company now sees itself as a technology company, the CIO has to be more strategic, understand how technology changes [existing] strategy, interact more with customers and drive revenue,” says Lori Beer, global CIO of JPMorgan Chase.

CIOs will have ramped-up expectations on their ability to deliver “innovation in many forms,” she explains. That means CIOs will be innovating on how and what the organization delivers for products and services as well as innovating on how it operates and how its employees do their day-to-day work.

Beer says CIOs also will face increasing expectations around managing risk and ensuring secure, resilient operations.

And CIOs can expect expanding duties around talent management, Beer says; she predicts that CIOs will spend more time helping colleagues understand emerging technologies and upskilling all employees (and not only those in IT) so all can collaborate on swiftly seizing business opportunities that new tech enables.

“All of this is here in various degrees today, but the importance of all this will become more important in the future as the world becomes more complex and more complicated,” Beer adds.

Len O’Neill, who in April retired from his position as senior vice president and CIO at The Suddath Companies after a decades-long IT career, had a similar take on the CIO of the future.

“You’ve got to be the visionary. You’re the one who has to see the opportunities and press your [colleagues] on seizing those opportunities,” he says. “You’re finding ways to differentiate and drive change. You have to read the landscape, have a vision, communicate that vision. You’ve got to be out in front. You have to be a pioneer.”

That means CIOs will have more opportunities — and responsibilities — for contributing to their organization’s revenue generation through the commercialization of digital products and services, O’Neill says.

To succeed in this future that O’Neill and others envision, these Hall of Fame inductees say CIOs will need all the skills required to do the job now; the ability to collaborate, communicate, and negotiate will remain must-have skills. Ditto for change management skills and the ability to influence without authority.

The CIOs of tomorrow

However, each inductee stresses that the CIOs of tomorrow will need new competencies, too.

Beers says they’ll “have to be very good at context switching based on the role they’re playing at any given time.” They may need to move from being the visionary at one meeting to educator at the next, for example.

CIOs also may need to learn how to manage an intellectual property portfolio as they commercialize more digital products and services, O’Neill adds.

Bryan Muehlberger, CIO and CTO of Lumiyo, says CIOs, whose view across the organization has fueled much of the growing importance of the position, will have to develop a deeper understanding for each of the parts within the enterprise — and the pressures and changes impacting each one — so they can successfully innovate, transform, and grow the business as expected.

And, not surprisingly, the CIOs of tomorrow will have to be continuous learners — just as they are today, he says, although the expectation is that they’ll have to learn even faster in the future than they do now (thanks to the ever-increasing pace of change).

There are practical reasons for considering what the CIO job will entail in the future, Beers notes. Current CIOs themselves must prepare, as do up-and-coming executives and the rest of the C-suite. “It has lots of implications for succession planning,” Beer says.

Sue Kozik, who retired in July from her role as senior vice president and CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana after 45 years in IT, says CIOs now and even more so in the future “have to be willing to solve real-world problems.”

“The CIO has evolved from run the railroad smoothly to tell me where technology can enable us to be the easiest, most intuitive, cost-effective organization,” Kozik says, adding that the CIO is the contender for this work because “the IT function is one of few in an organization that can look across enterprise.”

She adds: “Knitting together technology and business, that’s where you’re going to be transformational, that’s where you add value.”

‘It always come back to the CIO’

Already, the evolution of the top IT job has brought changes in the job’s title, these Hall of Fame inductees point out. They say those changes will continue.

Similarly, they say the job’s evolution is changing and will continue to grow the career opportunities that IT leaders themselves can readily seek.

Kozik, for one, says the CIO and COO roles may blur in more and more organizations in the future, given how much technology has become part and parcel of operations.

“You can’t have operations without technology, so it makes sense to me to bring those two positions together, and I think the CIO is better positioned for the role because of the CIO’s technology literacy,” she says.

Kozik says the title of EVP or SVP of operations and technology is a good fit for the combined role.

Others see more CIOs expanding their titles in the future to accurately reflect the expanding domains they oversee.

Like Muthukrishnan’s chief information, data, and digital officer, CIOs may find they have longer titles to reflect their increasing work on customer-facing digital products. So, they say, expect the CIO title to increasingly be combined with the chief technology officer or the chief digital officer titles, too.

At the same time, CIOs may see a proliferation of new titles that would likely answer to them, Muehlberger says. For example, organizations may create more and more chief AI officer positions and other such roles as new disruptive technologies come along and have those new jobs report to the CIO.

Muehlberger says he doesn’t expect the CAIO and other such new titles to displace the CIO, however. He says they might also be relatively short-lived positions in many organizations, as they get created to seize on learning and adopting the new technology before all of that gets folded back into routine IT operations and, thus, the list of CIO responsibilities.

“It always comes back to the CIO,” Muehlberger adds.

Meanwhile, the CIOs of tomorrow can expect to see their career options expand, too, with the position becoming a step to the CEO spot and board membership.

This year’s Hall of Famer inductees are on that path already.

O’Neill, for example, remains on retainer with Suddath to ensure a smooth transition between him and his successor. He’s also a principal at RedHands Partners, which offers advisory and other services. He says he is interested in more advisory work and board positions.

Kozik, who works with a nonprofit that builds workforce development programs in IT for unemployed or underemployed youth, is interested in board work, too.