The full form of CIO is Chief Information Officer.

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) is the most senior technology executive inside an organisation. The job title is used widely around the world in business and in government and in charitable and non-profit organisations.

The role of the CIO is to help to set and lead the technology strategy for an organisation, in concert with the other C-level executives. As such one of the many roles of the CIO it to provide an executive-level interface between the technology department and the rest of the business.

IT directors tend to be focused on day-to-day operations, while CIOs are outward-facing and more concerned with strategy and leadership. Some IT directors, in fact, report to CIOs, especially those working for large, multi-national organisations at a country or regional level who sit beneath a global peer. Not all organisations will have a CIO: smaller businesses use the job title IT director for their head of technology. Indeed, when it comes to technology executives, the picture concerning job titles is often far from clear.

The CIO’s responsibility for digital transformation, along with the rise of DevOps and agile styles of work, means the CIO works in a more cross-functional way than ever before, as noted in our HBR Analytics Services report, Transformation Masters: The New Rules of CIO Leadership. “Fast-moving, cross-functional teams of people from different parts of the organization experiment and innovate together to deliver new products and capabilities at an unprecedented pace. The old leadership rules don’t apply,” the report says.

As Adobe SVP and CIO Cynthia Stoddard says, “When you work cross-functionally, you can’t control everything. You need to collaborate and work together in different ways. At Adobe, we put aside titles when we’re working across teams to encourage everyone to participate and contribute at the same level.”

Giving up control and embracing failure are key, Stoddard says. “One example of these two mindset changes in practice was our data-driven operating model, where we integrated data across the entire enterprise into a unified data architecture – to run the business, drive predictive data insights, and deliver personalization. It’s always challenging when you have to get everyone on board with definitions, KPIs, governance, and bring together the right level of insight.

“This was truly a cross-functional effort, in which everyone from finance to product teams came together to lay out the vision. People had to give up individual tools and move toward a new way of working. If an idea didn’t pan out in the way we expected it to, we learned from it and applied those lessons to new ideas.”

That type of iteration exemplifies the agile style of work that many digital enterprises have found essential to improving time to market and customer experience.