Now More Than Ever, CIO Means Chief Integration Officer

After six decades in IT leadership, Charlie Feld, founder of The Feld Group Institute, argues the CIO role is more critical than ever—but only if it evolves. For executives who can communicate how emerging technologies like AI produce results in the context of their business while demonstrating the value of the role, now is the best time to be a CIO. 

In 2018, I wrote a response to Tom Davenport's provocative Fortune article, "Why No One Wants to Be a Chief Information Officer Anymore." Tom made a strong case that the CIO role had become thankless—too much heavy lifting, too much legacy mess, too much time playing "wet blanket" to colleagues chasing shiny new technologies.

I agreed with his analysis. I disagreed with his conclusion.

Eight years on, the pressure on the CIO role has only intensified. The C-suite has proliferated with technology-adjacent titles—Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, Chief Data Officers—each carving out territory that once belonged to IT leadership. Business leaders, armed with cloud subscriptions, AI tools, and more spending latitude than the CIO, increasingly bypass IT altogether. The old critique has returned with new force: Is the CIO role still relevant?

My answer today remains the same, only more emphatic: The CIO role isn't dying. It's evolving. The best CIOs are enterprise orchestrators and strategic enablers who work across functional boundaries and business units. And the IT executives who understand this evolution will become indispensable to their organizations.

The shift I described in 2018 has become urgent: CIOs must move from being Chief Information Officers to Chief Integration Officers. In the AI era, this transformation isn't optional. It's existential.

Forget Shadow IT. It's Everybody IT.

I've been in this field for sixty years. I was there in the 1960s when the mainframe was introduced. I've watched the role evolve from data processing manager to VP of Management Information Systems to CIO. And I've seen wave after wave of technological change reshape what the job demands.

Here's what I've learned about the pace of change: The mainframe/PC era lasted roughly 30 years. The internet era lasted about 20. The AI era will transform everything in 10—and we're already halfway through it.

This acceleration changes the game fundamentally. Technologies are no longer confined to the back office, where IT could control them. They're everywhere—at the edge of the business, embedded in operations, woven into customer interactions. Soon, robotics, quantum computing, drones, and other emerging technologies will intersect with each other and AI in ways we can't yet imagine.

The concept of "shadow IT" is obsolete. It's everybody IT now. Marketing runs its own AI experiments. Operations deploys its own sensors. Finance builds its own analytics and agents. The question isn't whether the business will adopt new technologies without IT's permission. They already are.

The creativity and innovation are great—and inevitable. However, uncoordinated and without proper architecture, this creates what I call the "hairball" problem. Most enterprises are trying to build AI capabilities on top of 30-plus years of tangled data, processes, and legacy systems. Layer upon layer of good ideas, one project at a time, over decades—and now a new layer of AI on top of it all. The result is fragility.

Consider an airline with multiple systems built up over time through mergers and acquisitions. Each system might have a different definition of "arrival time." In normal operations, this inefficiency is passable. In irregular operations—weather delays, maintenance issues, the need to re-route flights and re-accommodate passengers—this data inconsistency becomes crippling. For AI to handle these complex scenarios, there has to be a single, agreed-upon source of arrival data. One core data platform becomes the foundation for what I call a "digital nervous system," connecting systems and processes across the enterprise.

Without that integration, AI doesn't create intelligence at scale—it amplifies inconsistency and risk. One broken wire and everything stops.

Someone has to engineer the fabric that connects all of this. Someone has to design and build the data hub, establish integration points, and maintain architectural standards that enable speed without chaos or compromise while maintaining  security and compliance. If not the CIO, then who?

From Gatekeeper to Enabler

The Chief Integration Officer role requires a fundamental shift in mindset. The old model positioned the CIO as gatekeeper: the person who says no to risky technologies, who controls access, who governs what can and cannot be done. That model made sense when IT owned all the technology. Today, it's a recipe for irrelevance.

The new model positions the CIO as enabler and architect. The CIO can't control everything in the age of AI, nor should they try. But they can and must establish data, standards, and integration points—and rally other leaders and groups around them. The goal isn't to stop innovation. It's to make innovation possible at scale.

I think of this as the "core-and-edge" architecture. The CIO's job is to engineer a solid, leveraged core—a digital nervous system like my team built at Delta Air Lines, like Rob Carter's team built at FedEx as the "Platinum Core," and like Jean-Michel Ares' team built at the Bank of Montreal as the "Smart Core." This core is durable, secure, scalable, and well-engineered for resilience. It connects to data and events. It provides the integration fabric that connects everything else.

At the edges—in functions, lines of business, geographies—you enable speed, experimentation, and innovation. Business teams should be encouraged to come up with new ways of doing things, new ways of serving customers, new ways of operating. The integration architecture makes this possible without creating the next legacy mess.

The core architecture provides the coordination: the standards, the data hygiene, and the architectural guardrails that prevent chaos. The edges empower speed: the freedom to move fast, experiment, and innovate. An AI-forward enterprise needs both.

The Enterprise Orchestrator

In a functional, global organization, almost no one's job is to see the enterprise as a system. The CFO sees finance. The CMO sees marketing. The COO sees operations. The CIO, uniquely, sees how the pieces connect and is responsible for engineering the fabric that holds them together.

This makes the CIO the enterprise's orchestrator—not playing every instrument but making sure they're in harmony.

In the industrial era, functional excellence and continuous improvement were the backbone of good IT. In the AI era, those are table stakes. Cross-functional, cross-business-unit, and cross-ecosystem integration is the key to winning the future. Agentic AI traverses traditional boundaries. A customer-facing AI agent needs data from sales, service, operations, and finance. A supply chain optimization model needs integration with procurement, logistics, demand planning, manufacturing, and ecosystem partners.  Someone has to make these connections work.

To play this role effectively, CIOs need more than technical depth. They need business savvy: a genuine understanding of the issues and possibilities in marketing, finance, operations, and supply chain. They don't need to know as much about marketing as the CMO does, but they need to be curious and knowledgeable enough to spot opportunities others might miss. By the same token, all business leaders need to be technically savvy. In the future, all leaders should share a common language and understanding. 

CIOs also need allies. The CFO should be a close partner. Start with transparency—clarity on what technology spend is to run the business versus change the business and a shared understanding of technical debt. Make data integrity a joint priority, not an IT issue. When finance sees how architecture decisions affect margin, working capital, and risk, the conversation shifts.

The Chief HR Officer is another critical ally, particularly as AI reshapes the workforce. If IT shows up talking only about tools, the partnership stalls. If IT is focused on workforce impact, training, change management, and culture, the CHRO becomes a true transformation partner.

Finance and HR leaders are not the only collaborators to cultivate. We also need security and risk leaders with us, not against us. Integration without security is reckless, and security without integration is paralysis.

What makes these relationships work is trust. And you build trust by consistently speaking the language of outcomes, impact, and people—not the language of technology.

Be a Guide on the Journey

Here's the reality: Business colleagues will pursue new technologies regardless of what IT does. They're excited about AI. They're under pressure to deliver results. They have budgets and vendors eager to help them spend those funds.

A CIO who tries to block this energy will be circumvented. The CIO who guides the journey gets to set the standards. This means being proactive, not reactive. It means understanding new technologies well enough to articulate what's possible and what's prudent. It means providing guardrails that enable speed instead of barriers that prevent progress.

When someone in the business wants to deploy an AI tool, the integration-minded CIO doesn't say "no" or "not yet." They say: "Yes, and here's how we do it in a way that protects our data, connects to our systems, and doesn't create a mess we'll regret in two years."

This is where storytelling matters. I once watched Rob Carter simply explain why technology standardization matters. He told the story of electrical plugs. In the early days, there were dozens of different designs. Progress accelerated only when the industry agreed on a standard. Then, everything else could scale.

Architecture is abstract. Data integration is invisible. The CIO who can explain these concepts in terms the business understands earns the credibility to lead.

When teaching and developing next-generation IT leaders, this is what I emphasize most: technical skills are necessary but not sufficient. Communication, influence, and the ability to articulate the "art of the possible" are what make the integration role work.

The Best Time to Be a CIO

Yes, the job is hard. Yes, there are messy legacy issues. Yes, the pace is relentless, and the pressure is real. But I've been doing this for six decades, and I can tell you: this is the most exciting time to be in technology leadership. The organizations that get this right—that invest in genuine IT leadership, that empower their CIOs to play the integration role—will win. They'll move faster, adapt better, and turn AI into competitive advantage.

The organizations that undervalue IT leadership will struggle. They'll build AI on top of legacy “hairball” architecture, inconsistent data, and fragile systems. They'll create new and increasingly risky and expensive technical debt. They'll wonder why their transformation initiatives keep failing.

By contrast, the enterprises that value IT leadership will excel. The path is there. And for those who embrace the Chief Integration Officer role—who enable rather than control, who build coalitions, who tell the story of what's possible—the opportunity has never been greater.