• The role of the CIO is moving from technical planning and implementation to strategic planning. The current role of the CIO appears to be more tactical than broadly strategic. CIOs tend to focus on the planning and implementation of specific information technologies, rather than on long-term company strategy. The relatively limited vision of the IT function will need to be expanded, as knowledge management is recognised by the CEO and board as a central component of strategic planning. This change in orientation will have an important impact on the future training and recruitment of CIOs.
• The CIO will increasingly become an important voice in strategic planning. Currently, the CIO is not active in top levels of corporate planning and decision making. Despite the fact that IT has been heralded as a key to future business success and growing market share, it is striking that the CIO is often isolated from the company's top decision makers. Given this limited access, how can the CIO's skills be adequately leveraged by a company to help manage business growth and development?
• Leading the transformation of the CIO role is an important human resource challenge for companies. This will mean rethinking the skill set associated with the CIO function, including the way companies use the CIO, the CIO's relation to the senior officers, the performance expectations and evaluation process, and performance incentives and remuneration.
• The ideal qualifications for the CIO are changing as the IT function becomes more central to business planning. The ideal resume of the CIO will come to include both technical/engineering qualifications, plus a background in finance, marketing and strategic planning. There is currently some uncertainty about the best mix of qualifications for the CIO-and variations in background and experience emerge among the countries surveyed. For example, CIOs with a background in finance, engineering and IT-found especially in Europe-tend to stress the need for more general business experience.
• The CIO will become increasingly involved with external as well as internal customer support. The perceived success of the IT role is currently associated more with internal communications and networking than with external customer-based technology support. This role is likely to change as knowledge management expands to include external as well as in-house support functions.
• CIOs tend to be more strongly motivated by new and stimulating job challenges than by financial incentives. This trend is especially strong in the United States, where CIOs already have the highest remuneration.

        These changes in the scale and scope of the CIO role are only now beginning to be felt in the world's major corporations. Many CIOs find themselves in a kind of professional limbo, caught between a past where they were seen as technically oriented computer specialists, focused mainly on tooling up their shops with the latest hardware and applications, and a rapidly approaching future where they will become increasingly involved in strategic business planning at the highest levels of their corporations. Companies that can successfully manage the transition of the CIO from an information processing function to a knowledge management role will have an enormous competitive advantage over those that do not understand and adapt to the demands of this changing business world.
 

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