The 8 new rules of IT leadership — and what they replace

The CIO role continues to evolve, changing as dramatically as the technology it manages and maintains.

Moreover, the pace of the chief IT position’s transformation seems to be accelerating — likewise mirroring the speed of change in the tech stack.

As a result, tech executives must lead, manage, and work differently than they did in the past. Here, veteran CIOs, researchers, and advisers share the changes they’re seeing, offering a look at the new rules of IT leadership along with the old ones they’ve replaced.

Old rule: Serve the business
New rule: Lead together with the business

CIOs have seen their image morph from back-office techie to order-taker to supplier/service provider.

In recent years they’ve increasingly adopted the partner label, says Quintin McGrath, executive director of the Society for Information Management (SIM) Research Institute.

That partner role requires a new way of leading, McGrath says, one where the CIO and the rest of the business are in step together.

“If I had to put an image out there, it’s one of being jointly yoked with the rest of the business. The CIO is one of the oxen put in to pull the cart and is directly aligned with the others,” he says. “IT is literally running together with the business; it’s a really tight partnership that’s different today versus that supplier of the past.”

Old rule: Train workers on new technologies
New rule: Help workers become tech fluent

CIOs need to help workers throughout their organizations, including C-suite colleagues and board members, do more than just use the latest technologies deployed within the organization. They need to make them tech fluent, says Lou DiLorenzo Jr., principal and national US CIO program leader as well as AI and data strategy practice leader at Deloitte Consulting.

“It’s their responsibility to make sure that happens,” he explains. “They have to play a role in building that muscle, to say, ‘This is how your job will be different and it’s exciting and you have to learn,’ and make it accessible, interesting, and important.”

DiLorenzo acknowledges that those aren’t easy tasks, as CIOs will have to create enthusiasm and dispel fear about the significant changes that technology continually brings to organizations, ways of work, and life in general — a key 2024 takeaway for many CIOs.

“Historically that’s not how technology training has been approached,” he adds.

In the past, IT would arrange for training sessions, where workers learned how to use new systems. IT would identify particularly talented workers and give them extra training to make them super users who could guide their colleagues.

Now, DiLorenzo says, CIOs “have to enable curiosity” and create environments and platforms with the right number of guardrails to protect the organization and its data but at the same time allow workers to experiment and build based on their and their jobs needs, as well as “allow for creativity and enthusiasm and experimentation to do work differently.”

Old rule: Business transformation comes first
New rule: IT leads by example

CIOs today aim to be business leaders first and technologists second, but sometimes they need to find opportunities for their own IT departments to lead by example, DiLorenzo says.

“My invitation to IT leaders is, you should go first,” he says.

CIOs had a great opportunity to do that with generative AI, DiLorenzo explains. They could have adopted it first in IT, rapidly finding areas where the technology could add value and drive change and then use those successes within the IT department to highlight gen AI’s power and potential.

Although that should have happened everywhere, it often didn’t, DiLorenzo says, calling it a missed opportunity.

“The historical role of IT leaders is to ask, ‘What does the business want and how can I help them.’ But I remind tech leaders that one of the biggest line items in any organization is the IT budget. And when CIOs can show how to use technology to reduce costs or enhance deliveries, that’s great. [Then the CIOs can say, ‘This technology] worked great for us, and we all should get after it.’”

That’s why DiLorenzo advises CIOs to lead the way. “Go first, see how it goes and then figure out where it goes next.”

Old rule: Stay in your lane
New rule: Collaborate across the enterprise

The CIO domain was once confined to the IT department. But to be tightly partnered and co-lead with the business, CIOs must increasingly extend their expertise across all departments.

“In the past they weren’t as open to moving out of their zone. But the role is becoming more fluid. It’s crossing product, engineering, and into the business,” says Erik Brown, an AI and innovation leader in the technology and experience practice at digital services firm West Monroe.

Brown compares this new CIO to startup executives, who have experience and knowledge across multiple functional areas, who may hold specific titles but lead teams made up of workers from various departments, and who will shape the actual strategy of the company.

“The CIOs are not only seeing strategy, but they will inform it; they can shape where the business is moving, and then they can take that to their teams and help them brainstorm how to support that. And that helps build more impactful teams,” Brown says.

He continues: “You look at successful leaders of today and they’re all going to have a blended background. CIOs are far broader in their understanding, and where they’re more shallow, they’ll surround themselves with deputies that have that depth. They’re not going to assume they’re an expert in everything. So they may have an engineering background, for example, and they’ll surround themselves with those who are more experienced in that.”

John Marcante, US CIO in Residence at Deloitte who has worked in tech leadership for nearly four decades, says he, too, has seen the need for CIOs to bring a broader perspective to their roles as they’re now expected to lead big cross-functional teams and transform not just their tech stack but the entire organization.

“The CIO position is now a training ground for CEOs, so it has to be less siloed,” he adds.

Old rule: Prioritize the steady state
New rule: Advocate for continual change

Stable, strong IT infrastructure is more essential than ever, yet CIOs can’t succeed by making a steady state the-end-all-be-all. Instead, they must be change agents who are not only OK with constant change but advocate for it while ensuring infrastructure can scale to support that change.

“Success is managing change versus moving from one fixed stone to another,” says Bobby Cameron, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, where he focuses on best practices for IT. “For CIOs to be really successful in this new environment, they need to be able to make change continuous, and they have to find ways as leaders to help their people understand how to do that.”

He adds: “That means making structural changes.”

In addition to ensuring a mindset shift, CIOs must also change how work actually happens. Shifting from a project-based technology delivery approach to a product-based methodology that embraces incremental improvements throughout a solution’s lifecycle is a key transformation CIOs should consider undertaking.

CIOs must also break down siloes between teams to better support collaboration across the entire enterprise, and adopt agile development methodologies, Cameron says. They should also invest in technologies that enable agility and change, such as cloud computing. And they need to develop a governance structure that supports, rather than stifles, continuous change.

Old rule: Play it safe
New rule: Create a safe space that supports bold moves

“Building processes and controls that are required to keep the lights on, that’s not going to allow CIOs to lead the transformational change that organizations are trying to drive,” Brown says. “That approach basically constrains organizations rather than unleashing them.”

That’s not to say that CIOs should chuck all policies, standards, and controls.

“They’re still required, but they need to be more fluid, and they need to be automated, so they guide but they’re not taking all the CIO’s focus,” Brown says.

CIOs who consider controls and security requirements as guardrails and then automate as much of them as possible create an environment with more freedom to innovate, he explains. There’s space to maneuver, try, fail, and learn safely, with the guardrails — particularly automated ones — acting as a safety mat.

McGrath has similar advice for CIOs. “They need to move from ‘This is my stuff’ to ‘How can we work together.’ It’s providing the safe village where citizen developers can operate. It’s providing the environment in which the business can experiment without being constricted. CIOs have to be the enabler.”

Old rule: Advance by becoming CIO at a bigger company
New rule: Aim to become COO or CEO

Since the earliest days of the role, CIOs who wanted to advance their careers as IT execs moved to the CIO post at bigger companies.

There was a common belief that that was it, that there was nowhere else to go, says Peter Kreutter, WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management’s CIO Leadership Excellence Program faculty director and a member of the Board of Trustees for CIO Stiftung.

Indeed, some may remember how IT leaders used to joke that CIO means “career is over,” Kreutter says.

That phrase (once said half in earnest) isn’t bandied about anymore. The CIO position has gained more power and respect, such that CIOs have found other pathways to grow professionally by filling board seats or becoming entrepreneurs.

Now, CIOs increasingly see the role as a steppingstone to other C-suite positions – specifically COO and, in fact, CEO.

To make those transitions, CIOs not only need deep IT domain knowledge and industry expertise but also broad array of leadership and management skills.

Old rule: Deliver tech to drive the organization’s strategy
New rule: Deliver strategy

CIOs don’t have to become CEOs to set strategy; they should be doing so now.

“The CIO is a title and a role that is being disrupted,” says Nick Kramer, leader of applied solutions at SSA & Co., a global consulting firm advising companies on strategic execution.

“That means there’s an opportunity for innovative CIOs to rewrite their roles in their companies and to expand into areas and responsibilities they’ve never had before. [For example,] they can work on AI strategies but leave the tech behind in many ways,” he says.

Kramer advocates big leadership changes, saying that if he designed the CIO role today, he would move technology operations under the COO so that the CIO could manage strategy and innovation without getting bogged down in the run-the-machines work.