AI makes its case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’

AI is forcing CIOs to reconsider whether they should prioritize business acumen, traditional tech skills, or AI-specific expertise, as the technology introduces unfamiliar concepts and shifts in meaning that challenge even tech-savvy leaders. The article argues that the CIO's role as the company's top business analyst is now complicated by AI, requiring a new combination of skills beyond the old business-versus-technology dichotomy.

Once upon a time, there were actual arguments as to whether CIOs should be business people, not technology people. With any luck, these arguments were stomped out back here: “ The case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’ https://www.cio.com/article/222250/the-case-against-the-business-savvy-cio.html ” — which drove the arguments for this false dichotomy into the ground back in 2018. Some complications have arisen in the near decade since, so I’m afraid we need to revisit the subject — especially as the most recent of this has made the drumbeat for business-savvy CIOs that much louder. One source of this need was the case of the dreaded Digital adjectival abuse, also known as “Digital as a Noun.” Digital https://www.cio.com/article/230425/what-is-digital-transformation-a-necessary-disruption.html was a big deal back in the pre-COVID era. It matters here because for Digital to work, business leaders needed to be technologists, not just business people. As business leaders became better technologists, CIOs needed to keep up on the business potential for the various Digital technologies their business leader friends were suddenly asking for. Another source of confusion was COVID itself, and the discovery it led to on the part of those business executives not already convinced that the entire business ran on IT, and that any area that still relied on manual processes should be presumed incompetent. Rather than insisting on a full-blown ROI to justify automating a function, those relying on manual methods were or should have been asked to justify this choice. But as tendentious or tectonic as those shifts might have seemed at the time, AI is raising the now-what-do-I-do? equation to new heights. That’s because CIOs are now being given a new set of alternatives: You might have noticed an emerging trend in IT: The proliferation of articles about AI whose content even many tech-savvy CIOs can’t make heads or tails of. And no, the problem isn’t that their texts include a bunch of unfamiliar buzzwords https://www.cio.com/article/191262/most-misused-buzzwords-in-information-technology.html . Much of the offending content is rooted in unfamiliar concepts, not vocabulary changes. Or, even more frustrating, the puzzlement sometimes lies in familiar buzzwords whose meaning has changed and become obscure. So never mind whether CIOs should be business people or technologists. A more challenging question is whether CIOs should be business people, classically tech-savvy people, or AI/tech-savvy people. Or some combination of those alternatives. But wait, there’s a whole other level we need to dig through. That’s because this collection of confusing questions isn’t the starting point. It’s because, as CIO, the questions that matter aren’t about how the CIO engages with the rest of the company as an executive. It’s how the CIO engages as the company’s highest-level business analyst https://www.cio.com/article/276798/what-is-a-business-analyst-a-key-role-for-business-it-efficiencywhat-is-a-business-analyst-a-key-role-for-business-it-efficiency.html . With classical IT organizational architectures, a CIO could make sense of all of IT’s slices, dices, and levels, how the pieces fit together to make the business more effective, and how adding and rearranging the pieces could help make the business more effective and competitive. In the good ol’ days, that is, CIOs could succeed wearing their business analyst haberdashery without having to give up their executive function. Read the average opinion piece on how AI affects the CIO’s role and you’ll get the same tired back-office-to-front-office recommendations we waded through when Digital was king. But AI isn’t what’s driving that shift, if it even is a shift. No, here’s what I think the average CIO is in for: Once upon a time, one of the hallmarks of well-built IT was simplicity. IT professionals designed and engineered systems they and their colleagues could understand because the systems were designed to be graspable. Among the many changes AI is bringing to the fore is that AIs don’t need the same level of simplicity, and we can anticipate that AIs won’t be instructed to make their designs human-graspable either. We already have too many applications in the IT portfolio that are the only repositories of business logic the company has — the developers and business analysts who supported this business logic retired long ago. That was the case when simplicity was a design goal. Just imagine the scenario when AIs build systems for which simplicity isn’t a target they’re aiming for at all. See also: