I came back from a fabulous gathering of colleagues from Colgate, Davidson, Hamilton, as well as from Wellesley to discuss some of the next steps in blended learning/MOOC collaboration. What brought us together are two similar Mellon planning grants to see how we can collaborate on this subject. Another glue that binds us is that we are all offering or will soon be offering MOOCs through edX. We came up with specific action items and I will write about that later.

Today, at 2 PM, there is a twitter based discussion being organized by SearchCIO.com on the topic “Is the CIO still relevant?”.  An intro to this is available here. And it begins by saying “The traditional CIO is dead. Emerging from the ashes is a new breed of many-sided digital frontiersmen trying to find their place in an evolving enterprise.”. You get the picture.

Given that the title CIO itself is fairly recent, I chuckled when I read “The traditional CIO is dead”. In my opinion, there has not been enough “traditions” when it comes to the CIO role. In businesses, CIOs have really been the head of their information technology, whereas in Higher Ed, there has been considerable debate over the title – whether that should belong to the head of IT given that the libraries have been the sources of organized information for years before the disruptions caused by technology. Increasingly, the head of IT in Higher Ed are being referred to as the CIO, though it is a common title for the person leading the merged Library & IT organization.

One thing about titles – many a times, it is really not clear who we create these titles for. This is very important because depending on the answer to that question, titles have to be constructed. We already have way too many meaningless things in our midst such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)  software. How many know that Banner is our ERP software?

Anyways, getting back to the question of whether a CIO is relevant, I assume that they are asking whether the CIO role is relevant. If you look at how the role has evolved, there is no question that someone in that role, like me at Wellesley, is doing very different things than what someone in a similar role did a few years ago. Extrapolating that further, yes, the CIO role, like every other job, will transform itself constantly. Irrelevant? I am not so sure.

A CXO, where X can be digital, marketing, information etc. is a necessity for a wide variety of reasons. Despite the fact that we are beginning to flatten organizations and experimenting with agility, we are going to remain hierarchical for a long time to come. Everywhere you turn, hierarchy rules. The terminology for referring to leaders is different, but you still need a leader. This has demonstrated value. With an effective leader, there is clarity to what the organization is about, what it should do collectively, how its value is justified and measured etc. Such a leader can be inspirational.

So, call it what you want, you will need someone to lead or be the chief of the areas such as technology, information, digital etc. This person may morph into a chief digital officer today, a chief strategy officer tomorrow, whatever, but the core portfolio under such a person will remain, with considerable expansion to areas of responsibility.

And I am not saying this to defend my own position 🙂