Jargon: Chief Digital Officer
June 17, 2015
Navigate to “‘I Can Imagine a World Where We Have CDOs Instead of CIOs’ – Says Atkins CIO and CDO.” Sounds like a coinage designed to remove an important corporate function from reality.
I visited a company without a chief information officer. Hold that. The company did not have an information technology manager. Instead several individuals did different computery things. One of the senior managers told me, “We need to move everything to the cloud.”
Okay. The statement is easy to make, but without someone who knows about technology options, migration methods, work processes, and making technology do what users need to do their jobs.
The write up assumes that a company will have a CDO or chief digital officer. Well, many some companies have the funds to add a full time equivalent to manage “digital” zeros and ones. For me, the notion of a CDO is just a bit of a priority and responsibility problem.
The write up does not agree, stating:
The CIO and CDO of engineering juggernaut Atkins, Richard Cross, has weighed into the chief digital officer debate, suggesting that CDOs could one day replace CIOs.
The write up adds:
Cross, who told Computing yesterday that his job is to ensure that the firm is “digital by default” by 2020, said that despite some CIOs believing that the CDO role is just a ‘fad’, it could in fact replace the CIO position.
So, one person wants to have a more lofty title? I understand that, but it may be useful for the article to define the acronyms, provide some facts or semi facts about why the phrase “information technology manager” is not useful. I understand that there are some people who believe they know about social media, programming, marketing strategy and tactics, system architecture, and computing infrastructure. I have met a couple of people with this span of expertise.
The problem is that most companies today have pretty basic and quite difficult technical problems. These range from the Office of Personnel Management type of security issues to figuring out why the cost of the company’s Web site is rising more rapidly than any other information technology expense item. Search probably is a burr under employees’ saddles. The company is clueless when it comes to dealing with analytic methods which can be used by an employee quickly and easily.
The propensity to generate dorky buzzwords is blurring the very real technical work that organizations must do.
CDO? Forget that. Focus on the basics. Can employees locate the final version of the CEO’s PowerPoint used three days ago? How many organizations will have today’s staff on the payroll in five years? Heck, how many companies in business today will be viable in five years? My hunch is that doing the work is more important than printing a business card with a different title.
Stephen E Arnold, June 17, 2015
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