IT leaders burnish their reps in big business moments

“There’s never been a better time to be a CIO.”

IT leaders who’ve embraced this saying also understand that their role has never been more challenging.

Technology has become so interwoven in businesses that CEOs expect more than an IT pro who keeps core applications refreshed and PCs updated. They need strategic partners who can harness tech as a growth engine.

No wonder that 65% of CIOs now report to CEOs — up from 41% a decade ago, according to Deloitte research. “Technology is the strategic issue of our time,” Anjali Shaikh, program leader for Deloitte’s Global CIO Program, tells CIO.com. “It’s embedded and intertwined in the business strategy.”

This shift, although years in the making, accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as CIOs rushed to support increasingly remote businesses. The rapid rate of change accelerated in 2023 as the center of tech gravity shifted toward AI.

With such power comes increased responsibilities. Eighty percent of CIOs Deloitte surveyed said their roles have significantly expanded to meet business objectives.

While these duties take many forms and functions, they share a through line: helping IT leaders burnish their credibility. Every IT leader has a unique journey — and a personal story — about how they navigated their careers and elevated their profiles in the eyes of their bosses.

That time a cybersecurity assessment lead to a new gig

In 2019, ALM hired Jimi Li to conduct a company-wide assessment of a cybersecurity incident. Although Li had little experience managing cybersecurity issues, he proved so adept at mitigating the fallout that the data services firm hired him as its permanent CTO.

Li ran with it, taking on product management where he helped unify siloed functions such as sales, marketing, and engineering. These experiences helped Li evolve from primarily an executioner to a strategist.

It also fortified Li for ALM’s adoption of generative AI, which eventually helped drive revenue and EBITDA growth in the company’s run up to its merger with Law Business Research.

“My role is to be that lighthouse and to tell everyone how to focus their efforts so that we can move the needle and rally toward that goal,” Li says, adding that AI implementation and adoption became a “team sport“ for ALM.

Tech decisions — especially those involving the implementation and management of AI — are enterprise-wide decisions now, requiring multiple stakeholders to realize the vision.

Whether organizations succeed with AI or something else, Li says it’s important to give others’ credit, which helps IT leaders build relationships with their peers. “If they’re successful, give them the credit even if your team did the work,” Li says.

The road to the C-suite is paved with multiple roles

Sankara Viswanathan, CIO of 125-year-old construction and engineering concern Day & Zimmermann, credits emotional intelligence more than technical chops with helping him rise to his current role in 2014 after joining the company as an IT manager in 2004.

Viswanathan says that while technical skills are table stakes, he learned how to assuage the concerns of disgruntled employees who joined the company from several acquisitions. He gained credibility by recommending new colleagues for key IT positions.

“I realized it’s not tech that’s going to take me to the next level — it’s about empathy,” Viswanathan says. “It’s about people skills and how to influence others.”

Eventually, CEO Harold Yoh III tapped Viswanathan to streamline the firm’s shared services organization, which had grown top heavy over the years. This is where Viswanathan learned how to cut costs and manage financial operations.

“That made me a hero for our [shared services] business unit,” Viswanathan says. “You need to earn peoples’ trust by doing what you say you will do.”

This lends more credence to Deloitte’s research that today’s CIOs must be super collaborators who are equally comfortable working with C-suite peers as they are business line leaders — something that Shaikh said is becoming more essential.

“CIOs who are going to succeed are going to orchestrate and coordinate across various tech exec roles, partnering with the CISO, CTO, and business peers,” Deloitte’s Shaikh says.

M&A, divestitures, and spinoffs? Check, check, and check

For Jason “JJ” James, CIO of retail tech firm Aptos Retail, the path to raising his profile took several forms with emphases on securing operational efficiencies while growing revenue.

While working as an IT director at Servigistics earlier in his career, James helped facilitate several acquisitions.

“That’s where I cut my teeth, that helped me grow my career, and that’s helped me understand the deal,” James tells CIO.com. For example, the “what and why” behind the purchase, as well as whether it helped the company gain market share or a competitive advantage.

James leveraged these experiences for mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and carve-outs at multiple stops during his career, learning how to scale businesses and manage larger P&Ls.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is the CIO’s tried and tested playbook: managing people, process, and technology. This encompasses everything from retaining talent that keeps operations running to improving processes and transforming the business with technology.

“Now I have a definitive playbook on what to do,” James says. And presumably, what not to do.

Please — don’t call it a stretch role

If the anecdotes about how CIOs pursue, accept, or even fall into new roles sound familiar, it’s because they were previously known as “stretch assignments.”

Such roles have become a core part of the IT leader role — so much so that they’re less stretch assignments as much as they are opportunities to pad their credibility, Deloitte’s Shaikh says.

“None of these leaders earn more credibility by doing more IT,” Shaikh notes. “They earn credibility by stepping into moments when the enterprise needs them to show more judgment or breadth and curiosity beyond their formal remit.”

Such moments are also opportunities for CIOs to show their CEOs that they can excel in more strategic areas that matter to the business.

That bodes well for IT leaders looking to occupy the corner office one day. Sixty-seven percent of CIOs Deloitte surveyed aspire to be CEOs.