Are you looking to become or move forward as a CIO? Then you’ll need to polish your business and leadership skills across a range of domains or risk career stagnation.
Are you looking to become or move forward as a CIO? Then you’ll need to polish your business and leadership skills across a range of domains or risk career stagnation.
“CIOs really need to be conversant across just about everything the company does,” says Mike Loukides, vice president of emerging technology at technology and business training firm O’Reilly. “That kind of breadth doesn’t come easily and it’s not a specialized, single-skill job.”
We spoke with industry leaders to identify the skills that CIOs who enterprises fight over have in common. Here are the seven fundamental skills that will help you become a CIO superstar.
CIOs should be visionary, employing technology skills and insights to enhance business outcomes, says Peter Silas, CEO of medical records and billing firm Enable Healthcare.
Silas says his firm’s CIO was able to achieve assertive leadership by innovating new systems and using data effectively to improve service and efficiency. “An effective CIO in healthcare will ensure that technology is used to assist with actual outcomes, such as improved patient care, reduced delays, and data-driven prevention of illness,” he says.
A strategic leader will strive to build an innovation culture, Silas says. “At Enable, we facilitate an open teamwork environment in which all individuals across departments are invited to share their ideas with IT,” he states. “When everyone feels involved in change, the entire organization advances together.”
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 12/10/2026
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Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
When an organisation announces a turn like this, the announcement is rarely the interesting part. What matters is everything it forces to be reordered underneath: committed budgets, live contracts, teams built for something else. That is where you find out whether the decision had real backing or was a slide in a deck.
When I look at a move like this, the question is not which tool they bought but which capability was left installed: an architecture function that holds the line on criteria, a prioritised portfolio with real business owners, and metrics somebody actually reviews every week. Without that, any announcement dissolves within twelve months.
What usually goes wrong
Where I see this fail most is in the second half of the year. The announcement is made with energy, the team gets assembled, and eight months later the person driving it changed role or company. Without an institutional owner, not just a personal one, the programme fades without anybody formally cancelling it.
What to watch
- The real calendar of contracts and renewals: that is where you see whether the move was strategic or was an expiry date.
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
How I read this entry
I would treat it less as a technology story and more as a market signal. If one player moves this way, in twelve to eighteen months the rest will have to answer something. Better to decide now, calmly, what that answer will be, rather than improvise it when a client asks.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
