Artificial intelligence promises to accelerate many of the tasks and functions that drive today’s business. Few organizations have realized its potential, however, mostly because AI capabilities are still relatively new and legacy architecture limits AI project scalability.
Despite these limitations, chief information officers are under enormous pressure to deliver measurable, concrete return on AI investments, says executive recruiter Charley Betzig, managing director at Heller Search Associates, Inc. In this Q&A with InformationWeek, Betzig discusses the CIO job market and how AI is influencing the CIO’s role.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What do CIOs need to know about the job and the CIO job market? How is the CIO’s day-to-day role evolving?
It’s all about AI — and it’s not just AI, in of itself, but it’s AI value creation. That affects every search, every CIO role. There are always different starting points, and every CIO role is a little bit different. But baseline, we are looking for CIOs who have created value using AI.
Someone has to understand the business that they are walking into, understand the starting point, and then know how to build from that starting point to take the business where they want to go to achieve that value creation. Every business is starting on a different part of the spectrum. Some, to get value from AI, they are starting from a very primitive place in terms of data. You need to build a foundational data strategy to make sure data is clean and available so AI can be used to create that value.
Charley Betzig
Other organizations are further along, and you can start building those AI use cases more quickly. But it is really business acumen, to know the environment that you are walking into and how to move the organization forward from there. There is the cross-functional leadership — the IT function has evolved a lot over time. Early days, IT was more of a back-office function; it was a follower. Then you had this whole concept of IT as a leader — a CIO had to own all of technology in an organization. If the business owned any of it, it was bad, it was shadow IT. I think that is kind of going away too, especially with AI.
There is kind of this notion of the CIO is sort of the sherpa, and the business is the one climbing the mountain. But the CIO is there guiding the way, putting the right guardrails in place, making sure everyone is moving in the right direction when pushing AI. But you need the business to be the ones who are out there driving these use cases because they know what they want.
What are companies looking for in a modern CIO? Is an MBA important or are there certain certifications that are proving more valuable?
It’s always nice to have an MBA, but what I’m focused on is making sure CIOs have that right blend of technical chops and business acumen. Technical chops are the easiest thing to look for — we always look for CIOs that have a foundation in computer science or something like an information systems degree — those things point to that technical knowledge.
If they have an MBA, then that is a plus for sure. But I more look to the education to make sure they have that technical foundation.
Everything right now revolves around AI, but you still as CIO have to have that grounding in all of the traditional disciplines of IT. Whether that is systems, whether that’s infrastructure, whether that’s cybersecurity, you have to have that well-rounded background. Even as these AI technologies become more prolific, you must consider your past infrastructure spend, your cloud spend, that went into these technologies. How do you manage that? If you don’t have grounding in managing those costs, and being able to balance those costs with the innovation you are trying to create, that’s a recipe for failure on the cyber side. And AI is creating even more vulnerabilities from a cyber standpoint. Someone has to have that sort of foundation as well. You still have those classic disciplines you can’t forget about even as you’re searching for that shiny object.
Are there certain CIO-specific skills that companies have a hard time hiring for?
It goes back to that AI value creation — every company is trying to do that, and the hard part is it’s really a new thing. It’s not a ‘we can go out and we can recruit someone from Silicon Valley who is an AI pioneer and knows all about the sexiest different technologies that can be applied.’ Is that the best person to come into a manufacturing company in the Midwest and work with those employees on AI use cases to create value? It’s not. When we’re looking for skill sets, we’re looking for people who have actually taken those AI technologies and applied them within their organizations to create real business value — whether that is cost savings or top-line revenue creation, whatever those are.
It’s hard to find those candidates, because there are a lot of those people who can talk the talk around AI, but when you really drill down there is not much in terms of results to show. It’s new, especially in applying the technology to certain settings. Take manufacturing: there’s not that many CIOs out there who have great examples of applying AI to create value within organizations. It’s certainly accelerating, and you’re going to see it accelerating more as we go into the future. It’s just so new that those examples are few and far between. There are certainly people out there who have done it, they are just not all over the place.
What are CIOs looking for in both the organization and its employees when they are considering taking on a job?
Every one of these searches that we do, there is some change they are trying to achieve. It’s change, it’s value creation through technology. A huge part of that is making sure that business leadership and the employee base is receptive to that change.
There are varying degrees of that. One skill we always look for is change leadership, because you have to come in and guide the organization in that direction. But if you’re a CIO that is coming into an organization that is asking for that, you want to make sure that you have the backing of leadership, the leadership you are working for, that the business is hungry for that. If the desire is not there, then it is hard to make it happen.
Culture is one of the biggest parts of it, in finding that mesh. An organization can have a wish list of five things they want to achieve with a technology transformation, but if the culture isn’t ready for that, or if the CIO doesn’t match up with that culture, it’s going to be like an organ rejection. Culture is a big deal.
Once a new CIO is in their role, what roles and skills do they have a hard time hiring for?
In manufacturing, and cybersecurity ties into this too, the supply chain has had this convergence of operational technology. Tech you would see on the plant floor and information technology are coming together, and that has been happening for years.
From a cyber standpoint, the supply chain is one of the most vulnerable areas out there nowadays because so much of that operational technology is older and so it’s big target for hackers. Having cybersecurity talent that can deal with that too and knows the ins and outs of that is a hard-to-find skill.
What advice would you give to aspiring CIOs?
I’d say learn and be well-rounded. In everything that you do, partner with the business to try to drive those real results. Don’t just focus on the technology, focus on the real results and solutions that you’re driving for the business.