Is the position of CIO ever the stepping-stone to greater things?

The appointment of Philip Clarke, Tesco’s CIO and head of international development, to the CEO’s job at our most successful retailer last week seems to be the highest profile CIO step up to the top job that anyone in our industry can remember.  So, is this the start of a new age of IT directors truly changing board-level thinking and starting to lead companies?  Or are CIOs forever destined to be the Cinderella of UK business?

Based on previous surveys by recruitment specialists such as Robert Half and Veredus, the CEO is most likely to come from a finance or marketing background: certainly not from IT.  This whole area has recently been the subject of several blogs by Martin Veitch at CIO magazine, http://tiny.cc/i8ti6.  Apart from making the point that Tesco is an unusual and therefore unrepresentative company, he says that many companies are too risk-averse to ever promote the IT director to the top job while many IT director remits are inherently limited: they’re more about working pragmatically to support improve existing systems than driving strategic change.

Interestingly, Martin goes on to suggest that things might gradually change as the younger generation of IT-savvy entrants takes over the workplace. For them, technology will simply be the key to business operations because it has always been central to their daily lives, rather than being a business tool that their parents’ generation had to learn and adopt in the workplace.

My view is that it is inevitable too that the perception of IT will change largely because executive of all ages in business and government are learning (however belatedly in some cases) just how much technology, or existing technology infrastructures, can be directed towards transforming operations and overall productivity. The UK’s Office for National Statistics has reported that the UK’s business sector productivity rose by 28% in the 10 years from 1997.  A regular path from CIO to CEO won’t happen tomorrow of course, but the weight of evidence is beginning to show that as the UK workplace changes, the influence of the IT function and the opportunities for CIO advancement will only increase in importance as time goes on.