How CIOs Can Take Their Career To The Next Level: How CIOs Can Work With The Entire Company In Order To Be Successful

It's only after you become a CIO that you truly start to understand all of the things that you don't know. Your technical skills are probably what got you this job, but they are not going to be enough to allow you to keep it. You are going to have to decide if it's going to take getting an MBA to allow you to get a seat at the table with the company's other decision makers.

You want to become more than just a CIO, you want to become a high potential CIO who is known for going places. In order for this to happen, you are going to have to take action. You are going to have to find ways to make yourself valuable to your company.

Ultimately it all comes down to just exactly how much responsibility you are going to be willing to accept. The more that you are willing to take on, the more valuable you will become to the company. However, you need to be very careful and not go too far – the authority granted to you as CIO can be abused and then you may find yourself in a very difficult place.

The CIO job that you have today may not be your last job. If you are going to make a move to another CIO job, then you are going to want to make sure that you do it correctly. The last thing that you would want to do would be to make the wrong move.

In order to make the most of the CIO position, you need to be listened to by your company. This means that you need to be part of the right type of reporting structure. Not every industry gets this right; however, right now the power industry is starting to realize the importance of the CIO and it's a good place for a CIO to be.

To fully develop your CIO career is going to take a great deal of personal energy. This means that you are going to have to make sure that you have what it will take to be successful. No, you won't always be successful, but that's ok. Even the best of us stumble occasionally, but then we get right back up.

For more information on what it takes to be a successful CIO, check out my blog, The Accidental Successful CIO, at:

www.TheAccidentalSuccessfulCIO.com

Good luck!

Dr. Jim Anderson

About The Author

I must confess that I never set out to be a CIO. When I went to school, I studied Computer Science and thought that I'd get a nice job programming and that would be that. Well, at least part of that plan worked out!

My first job was working for Boeing on their F/A-18 fighter jet program. I spent my days programming fighter jet software in assembly language and I loved it. The U.S. government decided to save some money and went looking for other countries to sell this plane to. This put me into an unfamiliar role: I started to meet with foreign military officials and I ended up having to manage groups of engineers who were working on international projects.

Time moved on and so did I. I found myself working for Siemens, the big German telecommunications company. They were making phone switches and selling them to the seven U.S. phone companies. The problem was that the switches were too complicated. Customers couldn't tell the difference between one complicated phone switch from another complicated phone switch. Once again I found myself working with the sales and marketing teams to find ways to make the great technology that the engineers had developed understandable to both internal and external