Veteran of US Can and Ameristar Casinos, Sheleen Quish, weighs in on the rise of Chief Digital Officer, and the state of the CIO.

sheleen_quish_2_rndSheleen Quish is one of few executives who’s actually led operations, marketing, technology and HR organizations—not just taken a rotation through one or all. And she has some strong opinions on the current (and future) state of the CIO role, particularly with the rise of Chief Digital Officers, and what value they truly bring to the C-suite.

Quish held the CIO position US Can for six years, and served as SVP for IT and HR at Ameristar Casinos for seven years. She is one of nine prominent IT and business leaders featured in the book, Confessions of a Successful CIO (Wiley, March 2014), and she spoke recently with Brian P. Watson, who co-authored that book with Dan Roberts.

If you listen to the CIO echo chamber, it sounds like the CIO is in trouble. On one side you have Chief Digital Officers and new acronyms taking more of the CIO’s responsibilities. On the other side you have CMOs and shadow IT taking more of the CIO’s budget. What do you make of all this?

I don’t think it matters what the title is. There is a leader in the company that needs to be associated, responsible for and leading technology, digital or not digital. The CIO has to have a broad enough range of leadership skills that they can deal with any or all of those things—and, at the same time, be fully integrated with the business.

So it’s not that there’s no CIO of the future, or a digital CIO—there’s a leader who’s passionate about technology. And let’s be honest: it depends on what company it is, what products and services they deliver, or their maturity levels. We all know that there are companies at every point in the spectrum. We tend to talk about companies like they’re all in the same place. It’s such a fallacy for someone to say, “Everyone is trending in that direction, so I must be trending there, too.”

Within a company, there needs to be a reality check where its leaders look at a timeline and ask, where are we? Are we the most mature? Are we the most innovative? Are we popping out new technology products? Most of the companies in the world are not.

So, where are you? Are you leveraging technologies to drive down costs in a dramatic way?

The technology spectrum is backwards. If you’re young, you’re innovative and hip. If you’re old, you’re mature and probably not using the latest and greatest technologies. But that’s not entirely bad: you’re in a traditional business, and traditional businesses, by necessity, are not always going to be on the bleeding edge. If you’re company X and you’re producing cans, your margins are razor thin, and there’s only so much you can do with technology. Twitter won’t help you. A company like that is mature, it’s traditional, and it’s definitely going to have a CIO.

If you look at a startup that’s building cool, sexy apps, the back-end stuff is definitely less important than the products they’re creating. So they’re at the other end of the spectrum, and since they’re a digital company, they’d better have a Chief Digital Officer.

So you believe the CIO is here to stay?

All these arguments about the CIO becoming irrelevant are so misleading. It’s not one great big uniform bloc. It’s so unique and so specific to so many elements within companies and how they use technology. Being at one end of the spectrum or the other doesn’t make you good or bad. The key is to know what the heck you are.

It’s all about the business. When I look back at the companies where I’ve worked, they were a perfect fit for me. I’m not a technical person, and they were looking for alignment of IT and the business and driving results. Perfect fit. I would have been a disaster at Google or Apple. It has to be a match.

There are a lot of recruiters and consulting firms that could help set the right tone and expectations across the board, if only they could get past the buzz and stop promoting these false trends.

Think about it: You could put all kinds of different labels on different kinds of CIOs. Bread-and-butter CIOs. Innovative CIOs. Digital CIOs. But that’s a good thing.

Let’s not narrow the CIO role. Instead, let’s recognize the depth and breadth of the value this leadership role brings to business operations.

Related post: The Anticipator CIO: Procter & Gamble's Filippo Passerini, guest blog by Brian P. Watson and Dan Roberts

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