Where’s the “D” in CIO?

Joe Screnci · Executive Chairman and Founding Partner, Hoffmann Reed

Ask a board what they need from their next technology leader, and most will start with the delivery and management of technology. Ask them what went wrong with the last one, and rarely is technology mentioned.

Over almost four decades working with Boards to identify senior technology leaders across financial services, healthcare, government, higher education, professional services, and commercial enterprise, I have had this conversation many times. It reflects a gap between the relevance most organisations place on the CIO role and the strategic reality of what that role now requires.

This article draws on the latest global research, alongside our own experience from decades of senior technology leadership appointments, to set out what has changed, what it now takes to lead effectively in this role, and how organisations should hire for it.

In the early days of enterprise computing, the person responsible for the organisation’s technology lived in a world of mainframes. These were enormous machines, refrigerator-sized, temperature-controlled, and considered so impressive that many companies put them on display behind glass walls. The rooms became known as ‘glass houses.’ The people who ran them were called Managers of Electronic Data Processing, or Directors of Management Information Systems.

Their job was clear enough: keep the mainframes running, process the transactions, and manage the budget. In most organisations, they reported to the Chief Financial Officer because that’s precisely what the function was considered: a cost to be controlled, an operational necessity, a back-office service.

In 1981, William Synnott, then Head of Management Information Systems at the Bank of Boston, and his collaborator William Gruber, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, sat down to write a book. It was called Information Resource Management: Opportunities and Strategies for the 1980s, published by Wiley. In it, they coined a new title: Chief Information Officer. Their vision was striking for its time. The CIO, they argued, should be a C-level executive who shared power equally with the CEO. The question now is whether this mandate has finally caught up.

1. Forty Years of Catching Up

The journey from glasshouse to boardroom did not happen quickly or in a straight line. For most of the CIO’s existence, the role reported to the CFO. The logic was straightforward: if technology was primarily a cost function, it belonged under the executive responsible for costs.

That began to shift in the 1990s when the internet changed the nature of what technology could do for a business. CIOs started appearing at executive tables. Some even reported directly to CEOs. But progress was slow, uneven, and frequently reversed. During the 2008–2009 financial crisis, many boards moved CIOs back under the CFO to tighten spending control. As recently as 2010, fewer than half of CIOs reported to the CEO.

The pandemic changed the conversation permanently. Digital transformation, which organisations had been deferring for years, was forced into overdrive. Remote workforces, online service delivery, digital-first customer experiences: none of these was optional in 2020. The CIO became the most operationally critical person in many organisations almost overnight.

Deloitte’s research on CIO reporting structure adds a nuance worth understanding. Among CIOs who describe themselves as leaders of digital strategy, 55% report to the CEO. Among those who describe themselves as supporters of digital strategy, only 27% report to the CEO, with the majority still reporting to the CFO. In other words, the reporting line is not just a structural question. It signals what an organisation believes technology is actually for.

2. The Missing Letter “D” and Why It Matters

The title Chief Information Officer was designed for the glasshouse era. Its primary emphasis is on information systems and the management and governance of technology as a service to the organisation. It says nothing about digital transformation, artificial intelligence, data strategy, organisational transformation, innovation/disruption, or the cultural leadership that modern technology leadership demands.

The Chief Digital Officer title emerged around 2010 as organisations recognised that digital transformation, the reshaping of products, services, and customer experiences through digital technology, required leadership that most existing CIOs were not positioned to provide. The CIO was running the systems. Someone needed to reimagine them.

Many organisations have appointed separate CDOs alongside their CIOs. This created as many problems as it solved: overlapping mandates, territorial conflicts, and the uncomfortable position of having one executive responsible for running digital systems and another responsible for transforming them. The market has been moving steadily toward a synthesis. The most forward-thinking organisations have combined both roles into a single title: either Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) or Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO). McKinsey’s Global Tech Agenda 2026, drawing on a survey of more than 600 technology and business leaders, references both titles as the emerging standard in organisations where technology is central to strategy.

A signal to the market: A position description that still uses ‘CIO’ in the way organisations wrote it in 2005 is sending a message to the candidate market, and it is not the one most boards intend. The best candidates notice.

What the word order tells the market

Both combined titles acknowledge the dual mandate. But the word order is not a minor stylistic choice; it communicates a meaningful difference in emphasis, and candidates read it.

A Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) leads with transformation. It signals that reimagining how technology creates value is the primary ambition, with information governance as the foundation beneath it. It attracts candidates who are comfortable setting direction in ambiguous environments and driving change at pace.

A Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO) leads with stewardship. It signals that the integrity, governance, and reliability of information systems are foundational, with digital transformation built securely on top of them. It attracts candidates who are equally strong in governance and in innovation: leaders who understand that transformation without reliable foundations is just disruption with a better slide deck.

My recommendation for complex, regulated organisations

• For large organisations in financial services, healthcare, government, higher education, and professional services, the Chief Information and Digital Officer title is the more appropriate choice. The reasons go beyond semantics.

• Information governance, data sovereignty, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance are not secondary considerations in these environments. They are foundational and, in some cases, existential. An organisation that signals ‘digital first’ without ‘information first’ risks telling themarket, and its own stakeholders, that it prioritises pace over prudence.

• The most capable technology leaders are those who have earned the trust of boards, regulators, and professional communities and are more likely to be drawn to a role where information stewardship is foundational. These are the people who build durable capability, not just impressive transformation programmes.

• A digital-led mandate that is not anchored in operational credibility tends to generate resistance from the finance, legal, and governance functions whose support a new leader most needs in the first months. CIDO signals a balanced brief.

• In sectors where public trust and data stewardship are central to institutional legitimacy, ‘digital’ as the lead word can suggest ‘speed first, governance second’ regardless of the actual candidate’s approach. First impressions in executive search, as in most things, are difficult to undo.

For organisations whose primary mandate is commercial disruption, product innovation, or customer experience transformation, such as technology-native companies, consumer brands, digital-first businesses, CDIO may better capture the role’s priorities. The right choice is context dependent. The wrong choice is any choice made without deliberate thought.

3. The Forces That Justify the Change

The argument for adding the “D” is not cosmetic. It reflects a genuine and profound transformation in what the role now requires, driven by forces that have converged over the past decade and accelerated dramatically in the past five years.

From information manager to strategy architect

McKinsey’s Global Tech Agenda 2026 identifies what it calls a structural shift in business. Top-performing CIOs are no longer just managing technology. They are designing their organisations around it, weaving AI and data into operating models to build what McKinsey terms ‘intelligence-driven enterprises.’

This is the shift Synnott and Gruber imagined in 1981: the technology leader as genuine co-architect of business strategy. The difference is that nobody imagined it would take four decades, or that AI would be the catalyst.

The AI inflection point

No force is reshaping the technology leadership mandate more profoundly than artificial intelligence. The transition from early experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment has been faster than most organisations anticipated, and the implications are structural rather than incremental.

94% of CIOs expect major changes to their plans and outcomes within the next 24 months, according to Gartner’s 2026 CIO and Technology Executive Survey. Only 48% of digital initiatives currently meet or exceed business targets. The gap between investment ambition and value delivery is the defining challenge of this moment.

The emergence of agentic AI, autonomous systems that can plan, reason, and act across workflows with minimal human intervention, is adding urgency to an already complex landscape. Gartner predicted in June 2025 that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, primarily due to escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls. The reason, Gartner’s analysts were careful to note, is not that the technology fails, but that organisations are automating broken processes rather than redesigning them.

Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise 2026, which surveyed 3,235 business and IT leaders across 24 countries between August and September 2025, found that while close to three-quarters of organisations plan to deploy agentic AI within two years, only 21% have a mature governance model for autonomous agents. There is a serious and widening gap between deployment ambition and governance readiness.

The distinction that matters: Organisations that extract real value from AI are not the ones deploying the most tools. They are the ones led by technology executives who understand that AI transformation is primarily a process redesign and change management challenge, not a technology procurement exercise. This is exactly the capability the “D” is meant to signal.

Cybersecurity: from technical function to fiduciary responsibility

For most of the CIO’s history, cybersecurity sat well below board level. Nation-state actors, ransomware at scale, AI-enabled attacks, and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities have permanently changed that. Boards and regulators now expect the technology leader to provide meaningful assurance, not just to implement controls, but to translate risk into governance language and own the security culture of the organisation.

Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2026 report identifies what it calls the AI cybersecurity paradox: the same technologies driving competitive advantage simultaneously expand the attack surface in ways that traditional perimeter defences cannot address. Shadow AI deployments, adversarial attacks on AI models, and autonomous systems operating at machine speed create vulnerabilities that the glasshouse era never contemplated. The modern technology leader must hold both sides of that paradox at once.

Data sovereignty and the geopolitics of technology

A dimension has entered the role that did not exist five years ago: the geopolitics of digital infrastructure. As AI systems become strategically significant and data governance regulations proliferate across jurisdictions, technology decisions are simultaneously technical, legal, commercial, and political.

Gartner’s 2026 CIO survey found that 32% of CIOs outside the United States are deliberately shifting toward regional vendors, driven by data sovereignty concerns and geopolitical risk. For organisations operating across multiple jurisdictions, this represents a material change to how infrastructure must be designed and governed. It requires fluency in geopolitics, regulatory affairs, and long-term institutional risk that no previous generation of technology leaders was expected to possess.

The talent and culture imperative

McKinsey’s April 2026 research on redesigning technology workforces for the agentic AI era notes that technology leaders are having to rethink hiring profiles, build internal capabilities alongside vendor strategies, and manage the workforce transition to hybrid human-AI ways of working. This is people leadership of considerable sophistication, and it comes on top of everything else.

BCG’s research has consistently found that up to 70% of digital transformations fail to deliver on their objectives and that the dominant reasons are human and cultural, not technical. Change resistance, inadequate change management, and a failure to bring people with the programme are the recurring culprits. The technology leader who can genuinely navigate this, not just the technology architecture but the organisational psychology of transformation, is exceptionally rare. It is also increasingly the baseline.

4. What the Role Now Requires — and How to Assess It

The forces above have created a role that is categorically different from what most position descriptions reflect. Here are the capabilities that distinguish genuinely high-impact technology leaders from competent ones, and the questions that reveal them.

Strategy architecture, not IT management

The modern CIDO must be a business leader who understands technology deeply, not a technologist who has been elevated to the executive table. The difference is almost immediately visible in how a candidate talks about their previous roles. One describes outcomes and strategic decisions. The other describes systems and projects.

Assessment tip: Ask the candidate to describe a technology decision they made that was primarily a business decision. The specificity of the answer, the trade-offs articulated, and the connection to commercial outcomes will provide valuable information.

AI leadership and responsible deployment

Every organisation hiring a technology leader in 2026 is implicitly also hiring an AI strategy lead. Candidates who can articulate where AI creates genuine, measurable value, and where it introduces risks the organisation is not yet equipped to manage, are operating at a fundamentally different level from those who speak only of capability and possibility.

Assessment tip: Ask what they would not do with AI in your sector, and why. Candidates who answer honestly and specifically identify governance gaps, ethical considerations, and organisational readinessbarriers are considerably more capable than those who cannot.

Enterprise transformation leadership

The research is consistent: digital transformation fails for human and cultural reasons far more often than for technical ones. The ability to lead organisational change and build digital literacy across a diverse workforce, navigate resistance, and sustain performance during complex transitions is the capability most often missing in technically strong candidates. It is also the hardest to assess from a résumé.

Assessment tip: Ask the candidate to describe a significant technology programme that encountered serious organisational resistance. Listen to how they describe the human dynamics, what they did differently as a result, and what they would change in retrospect. Candidates who answer in terms of better communication plans are telling you something. Candidates who describe stakeholder misalignment that they failed to anticipate early enough are telling you something more useful.

Cybersecurity fluency at the governance level

The modern CIDO does not need to perform the functions of a Chief Information Security Officer. But they must be capable of providing meaningful cybersecurity assurance to a board and translate threat landscapes, risk exposure, and control effectiveness into language that allows governing bodies to make informed decisions and discharge their fiduciary responsibilities.

Assessment tip: Ask how they have presented cybersecurity risk to a board or governing body. The best candidates describe a specific conversation, the concerns the board raised, and how they turned technical complexity into governance clarity.

Commercial acumen and financial fluency

Gartner’s 2026 CIO Agenda research finds that CIOs who relentlessly pursue financial outcomes from technology initiatives, particularly AI, are 25% more likely to be top performers. Yet only a third of CIOs consistently translate technology investment into measurable financial returns. The ability to build a credible investment case, model returns, and present to a CFO and board with genuine commercial rigour is now a baseline capability, not a differentiator.

Assessment tip: Ask how they built the business case for their most significant technology investment. Look for specificity about the financial model, the assumptions that were challenged, and what the outcomes actually achieved against the case that was made.

5. How Most Hiring Processes Fall Short

The most common failure mode in senior technology leadership appointments is not a failure of candidate quality. It is a failure of process design. Most position descriptions for technology leadership roles could have been written a decade ago. They describe technical domains. They list qualifications. They mention ‘leadership’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’ in the final paragraphs as if they were afterthoughts. And then the organisation wonders, twelve months later, why its outstanding technical candidate is struggling to drive change.

Start with outcomes, not job descriptions

Before a word of a position description is written, the hiring executive and board should answer three questions:

• What does this organisation need technology to enable in the next five years?

• What are the challenges that are currently preventing that from occurring?

• What will the new leader need to transform, not just manage, to achieve the required objectives?

These questions generate a fundamentally different brief. They surface cultural and political dynamics, legacy constraints, and stakeholder relationship challenges that no standard template can capture. A search grounded in outcome definition, supported by structured consultation with the key people the new leader will need to influence, consistently produces better appointments than one built from last year’s position description.

Map the market before you advertise it

The best candidates for a senior technology leadership role are rarely actively looking. They are running large, complex functions and are unlikely to respond to an advertisement, however well crafted. A properly resourced executive search maps the complete universe of relevant candidates across comparable organisations, sectors, and geographies, and approaches them directly.

In our experience across hundreds of technology leadership appointments, research-led candidate identification consistently surfaces the people who perform best over the long term, precisely because it reaches the leaders who are too busy delivering results to monitor job boards.

Assess the whole leader

The capabilities that determine whether a technology leader succeeds in transformational leadership, stakeholder influence, cultural fit, commercial acumen, and leadership under genuine pressure are almost entirely invisible on a CV or LinkedIn profile. A rigorous assessment process addresses this through:

• Structured behavioural interviewing built around the specific outcomes defined in the role brief and prior success overcoming the challenges the organisation faces, not a generic interview guide

• Psychometric and leadership style assessment that provides objective data on decision-making style and interpersonal dynamics

• Behavioural reference conversations that are structured, specific, and focused on contexts most relevant to the role, not the comfortable affirmations that characterise most reference calls

• Scenario-based assessment presenting candidates with a real strategic challenge the organisation actually faces

• A social and professional footprint review is an increasingly meaningful signal of how a candidate engages publicly with their field and conducts themselves professionally

Career Transition Onboarding

The most common point of failure in senior technology appointments is not selection; it is transition.

Organisations invest considerable resources in finding the right person and then leave them to navigate a complex, unfamiliar environment, largely unsupported in the critical first ninety days.

Leaders who receive structured onboarding support, including clear expectations, early stakeholder access, and frameworks for building credibility in a new cultural context, perform significantly better at the twelve-month mark. The investment in supporting a new CIDO through transition is a fraction of the cost of a failed appointment.

“We identify candidates with the capabilities that matter, not the ones that get someone through the interview. They are the ones that sustain performance after the honeymoon period is over.”

6. What Exceptional Leaders Have in Common

Having placed senior technology leaders across multiple sectors, geographies, and organisational contexts over thirty-plus years, and having mapped thousands of CIOs and CIDOs in the course of those searches, certain patterns consistently distinguish the people who perform at the highest level. The most important thing I can tell you about these patterns is this: they are almost entirely invisible on most CVs. They emerge in how the person leads, not where they have been.

• They speak the language of the mission, not the technology. They describe digital strategy in terms of what the organisation is trying to achieve for its customers, employees, or communities and then explain how technology enables each. They are not running a parallel conversation.

• They have already bridged the technical and the commercial. They can present to a board with the same fluency they bring to a technical architecture review. They understand what governing bodies need: measurable outcomes, managed risk, and genuine confidence that the function is in capable hands.

• They have led large-scale change, not just overseen it. Not announced it. Not governed at arm’s length. They have personally navigated its resistance and delivered its outcomes. And they can reflect honestly on what was hard, not just what they achieved.

• They have built a culture, not just a team. Their direct reports advocate for them. People have developed. Some have been promoted. This is not accidental; it reflects an intentional approach to creating environments where talented people want to stay.

• They hold a nuanced view on AI, not evangelical enthusiasm, and not cautious resistance, but a considered, evidence-based perspective on where AI creates genuine value, where it introduces risk, the organisation is not ready for, and what governance is required to navigate between them.

• They are honest about what they do not know. The landscape is evolving faster than any individual can fully track. The leaders who acknowledge that, build teams whose capabilities complement their own, and maintain intellectual humility are consistently more effective than those who project omniscience.

• They are externally engaged and intellectually generous. They participate in professional networks. They share their thinking before the outcomes are certain. This is a signal of leadership confidence, and it correlates strongly with the continuous learning that these roles now demand.

A Final Thought

In 1981, William Synnott sat in a glasshouse full of mainframes and imagined a future in which the person who led technology would share power equally with the Chief Executive. It was a remarkable act of foresight. It was also, for decades, an act of optimism that reality stubbornly refused to validate.

The glasshouse is long gone. The mainframes have been replaced by cloud infrastructure, AI models, and autonomous systems that operate at speeds no human can match. And the technology leader, whether titled CIO, CDIO, or CIDO, finally has, in most organisations, the seat at the table that Synnott envisioned.

The question now is whether the title, and more importantly, the mandate, the selection criteria, and the assessment process, have caught up with what that seat actually requires.

The ‘D’ is not just a letter. It represents digital transformation, data intelligence, and the dozen dimensions of modern technology leadership that the original title never contemplated. Adding it, or not, tells the market, and the organisation’s own stakeholders, exactly what kind of leader the board believes it needs.

Most boards have not yet answered that question deliberately. The ones that do, and that bring the same rigour to this appointment that they bring to their most consequential strategic decisions, are the ones that will build enduring advantage in an era defined by whoever leads technology most effectively. The rest will still be searching for their EDP Manager.

“The question is not whether your next technology leader can manage the systems. The question is whether they can manage the organisation and shape the strategy of the business around it. A title that does not reflect that ambition will not attract a leader who can deliver it.”

About the Author

Joe Screnci is Executive Chairman and Founding Partner of Hoffmann Reed, a multinational executive search and advisory firm with 17 offices across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Joe has more than 38 years of experience placing senior leaders across financial services, healthcare, higher education, government, and industrial and commercial enterprise. He advises boards and executive teams on leadership strategy, succession planning, and organisational transformation.

Joe.screnci@hoffmannreed.com I www.hoffmannreed.com

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