During the Panduit/Power Analytics luncheon at the Uptime Institute last Thursday, one speaker noted the most CIOs do not get to play golf with the CEO and many of the other executives at the C-level. I don’t remember who made this important point. In the midst of the discussion, I missed the significance of the point. And, more importantly, I’m a hockey player.
Of course, if it’s true that CIO doesn’t golf with the CEO, the CIO most likely also doesn’t have good access to the board or even sit on an equal footing with C-level executives. The implication that the CIO is sort of a junior member of the club is disheartening considering the efforts the industry has made to learn to tailor arguments to the C-Suite. Mission Critical has runa number of such articlesover the years. So what to make of thisarticle in Tuesday’s Wall St. Journal? John Bussey writes, “Gather a table of CEOs together, and you'll hear tales of the thousands of hacker attacks they regularly repel-and sometimes can't.“But ask those CEOs if their chief information officers report directly to them, and you’ll likely et a minority saying ‘yes’-under a half as a low as a third, different surveys show.” I’ll leave you to read the rest of the Journal article yourself, much of it is about Sony’s recent data breach, after noting that the headline of Bussey’s article-“Has Time Come for More CIOs to Start Reporting to the Top?” might serve as its conclusion.
More troubling, though, is Sony’s eventual plan for improving data security. According to Bussey, the company now has a chief information security officer, who reports to the CIO, who reports to a chief transformation office and not directly to the CEO.