Why is IT always a candidate for dissection
This Week with CIOs
Recently, we posed the question to IT leaders: Why do companies repeatedly carve emerging technologies away from IT leadership and create new executive roles? For example: Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, and now Chief AI Officer. No other business function gets fragmented this way every time change accelerates, why IT?
The answer hurts
Sekhwela Mokgala, Chief Data & Digital Officer at Metair Investment Limited, argued that many of these decisions are not reactions to technology hype at all, but responses to “strategic non-delivery” and growing business frustration with IT organizations that cannot keep pace with transformation demands.
That phrase stopped a lot of people in their tracks, because everyone in the discussion immediately understood what he meant.
The boomerang effect
What made the discussion especially interesting was that even many of the people defending these new leadership structures acknowledged the problem with this approach: eventually, the work comes back to IT anyway.
Pilots are one thing. Enterprise execution is another.
From theatre to accountability
Once new technologies move beyond experimentation, organizations eventually collide with the realities of integration, governance, operational resilience, security, and scale. At that point, the discussion tends to shift away from innovation theatre and back toward enterprise accountability.
Perception or execution, what do you want?
Golam Mustafa, Assistant GM of IT Applications at Emami Agrotech, pushed the conversation even further when he asked: “Are we solving for perception, or for execution?” Word.
Beneath the debate about org charts and executive titles is something larger: many organizations still appear uncertain whether the CIO is fundamentally a strategic business leader or primarily the operator of enterprise technology infrastructure. And, perhaps that explains why this cycle keeps repeating itself.
Every time technology becomes more central to the business, companies start searching for leadership outside the CIO role. Then later, when execution complexity arrives, they rediscover why enterprise technology leadership mattered in the first place.
That’s the tension that sits at the center of the entire discussion. And judging by the reactions, it is far from resolved.
