CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency

As CIOs cope with digital disruption, the good news is that personal indicators lean positive. Compensation is up 7 percent, tenure holds steady, at about six years, and so does the portion of CIOs reporting to the CEO, at 44 percent, according to our 14th annual State of the CIO survey.

But don't rest easy. This year's results also reveal a collection of alarming disparities between what business colleagues want from IT and what CIOs think they're providing. That gap came to light when we worked with market research firm IDC, a sister company of CIO, to survey 304 non-IT business decision-makers on some of the same questions the State of the CIO survey posed to 558 IT leaders.

When conceiving big projects, CIOs often talk about finding the "pain points" in a process and fixing them. That's IT Management 101. But it seems CIOs haven't identified all of the pain points in the interaction between IT and the rest of the company. For example, 54 percent of business leaders see the IT group as an obstacle to getting things done, but only 33 percent of CIOs have the same impression. Business leaders want the CIO to simplify technology; it's the most important thing CIOs can do to improve relations, they say. They also say it's much more urgent than CIOs think for the IT group to reorganize, to be easier to work with and to train IT people to focus on external customers.