12 CIO Personas
Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices
Pearl Zhu
The Author of “Digital Master,” & “Future of CIO” Blog
WWW.PEARLZHU.COM
CIO MASTER
DIGITAL MASTER

“Digital Master” Book Series
21 Books

Title: 12 CIO Personas
Sub Title: Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership
Practices
Author:
Pearl Zhu
ISBN: 978-1-44682-7
Copyright Date:
Dec. 2017
About “CIO Master”

Summary This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s
Situational Leadership Practices” is the
extensive brainstorming and logical content
expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash
the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and
reinvent CIO leadership via practicing
multitudes of digital influence.
CIOs have multiple personas, varying
personalities, and impressive leadership
profiles. The personas can be seen as the
“public relations” part of digital CIOs that
allow them to interact socially in a variety of
situations with relative ease. Contemporary
CIOs are expected to wear many hats to
practice situational leadership effectively.

12 CIO Personas
● Chief Information Officer: CIOs take charge of one of the
most invaluable business assets - information.
● Chief Innovation Officer: Ideally, CIOs are “Chief Innovation
Officers” who are expected to constantly propose new
ideas and challenge the status quo.
● Chief Insight Officer: Go deeper, CIOs are “Chief Insight
Officers,” who can provide information-based insightful
advice for business executive peers and lead profoundly.
● Chief Improvement Officer: In practice, CIOs are “Chief
Improvement Officers” who lead IT to continue optimizing
business capability and improving organizational maturity.
● Chief Instrument Officer: CIOs play an instrumental role in
chartering digital paradigm shift seamlessly.
● Chief Interpretation Officer: CIOs are fluent in both
business language and IT terminology to ensure
cross-functional communication without “lost in
translation.”
● Chief Inspection Officer: CIOs should do periodic IT
quality checks to ensure its effectiveness, efficiency,
performance, and maturity.
● Chief Interaction Officer: CIOs need to build solid
business relationships across the digital ecosystem.
● Chief Intrapreneur Officer: CIOs are able to run IT as a
software startup and the business in the business.
● Chief Investment Officer: IT investment can often
become the decisive factor to run a high-performance
organization.
● Chief Integration Officer: CIOs need to reinvent IT as
the linchpin to bridge IT-business gaps and strengthen
the weakest links to catalyze digital transformation.
● Chief Influence Officer: Digital CIOs today must develop
their leadership competency to make multidimensional
influence across the organization.

CIO Masters’ Multiple Hats

Back to its root, the CIO role is
to be a "Chief Information
Office," as an information
management master for the
dynamic digital corporation.
Because nowadays, IT is
permeating into every corner of
the organization, and
information is the lifeblood of
any business across industrial
sectors.
Chapter 1 The CIO as “Chief Information Officer”

Digitalization opens the new
chapter of innovation.
CIOs need to present the
entrepreneurial spirit, learn to
think and lead innovatively, take
calculated risks while nurturing
contingencies and growing great
talent, etc.
Chapter 2 The CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer”

The pace of changes in IT would
force more CIOs to shift into the
insightful digital leadership role for
exploring the breadth and depth of
digital new normal.
Because IT plays a significant role in
driving digital transformation. Also,
because IT is uniquely positioned to
observe processes across the
enterprise and build differentiated
business competencies.
Chapter 3 The CIO as “Chief Insight Officer”

Continual improvement" is an IT
mantra in the digital era. There is
never "enough" to optimize IT
operations and improve
organizational maturity.
Continuous improvement is by tweaks
of things in the old fashion way to
bring efficiency. But, even a very small
improvement leverages a new way of
doing things, brings an outside
method or view, and shifts the
paradigm, to get digital ready.
Chapter 4 The CIO as “Chief Improvement Officer”

The digital paradigm has many
dimensions, organizations can harness
the power of information to provide the
emergent business trends with a
fact-based vision of where to aim and how
to get there, through identifying the right
information, validating it and
communicating it to right people at the
right time.
IT is the linchpin of the emergent digital
ecosystem, CIOs play an instrumental role
in chartering a multidimensional digital
paradigm shift seamlessly.
Chapter 5 The CIO as “Chief Instrument Officer”

The clear-cut divide that used to be
there between IT and business in the
olden days is vanishing fast; IT is the
business. IT-business relationship needs
to be shifted from alignment to
integration to ensure that the business
as a whole is superior to the sum of
pieces.
The top leaders such as CIOs have to be
fluent in both business and IT dialogues,
and switch them back and forth without
“lost in translation.”
Chapter 6 The CIO as “Chief Interpretation Officer”

IT plays a significant role in digital
transformation, as more often than not,
technology is a major digital disruptor
today.
The purpose of digital transformation is
to embed digital technology into key
business processes and improve business
capabilities to compete for the future.
The quality check of IT management is to
ensure IT is the enabler and even a
game-changer of the digital
transformation.
Chapter 7 The CIO as “Chief Inspection Officer”

Good relationships with the right people
make a business work. All businesses come
down to people who plan to implement a
solution.
Whether it is with IT assistance or just by
re-engineering an existing process, the work
begins with people, the praise comes from
people and the complaints often originate
with people.
Modern CIOs as “Chief Interaction Officers,”
can master how to well manage different
dimensions of IT relationship to improve
leadership effectiveness.
Chapter 8 The CIO as “Chief Interaction Officer”

Corporate Entrepreneurship or
intrapreneurship has been recognized as a
potentially viable, it means for promoting and
sustaining organizational performance,
renewal, and corporate competitiveness.
Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, and
then attitude, skills are the easier part to be
developed.
Intrapreneur leaders present solid leadership
attributes such as “full open communication,”
“creativity,” “confidence,” “resourcefulness,”
“decisiveness,” “ownership,” “self-adaptation,”
and "resilience."
Chapter 9 The CIO as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”

Nowadays, technology is the disruptive
force behind digital transformation
and information is the gold mine all
forward-thinking businesses are
digging in. Companies across
industrial sectors claim they are in the
information management business.
Thus, IT investment in the business can
often become the decisive factor for
running a high-performance
organization with the long-term
perspective.
Chapter 10 The CIO as “Chief Investment Officer”

It is the digital era, IT organizations are
transforming from “Build to last,” to
“Design to Change” and “Cloudify to
Speed Up.” Especially, in large complex
enterprises where there are many revenue
streams, many business units, many
geographies involved, many products and
services will be having a variety of data,
the variety of systems to handle the
business.
Integration is not always cost-effective,
but to ensure that the application
ecosystem offers real value and agility.
Chapter 11 The CIO as “Chief Integration Officer”

Last but not least, CIOs are “Chief Influence
Officers.”
The command-control leadership style is no
longer fit for the hyperconnected and highly
transparent digital new normal. Digital CIOs
today must develop their leadership
competency to make multidimensional
influence across the organization as well as
the digital ecosystem.
A digital CIO has to be a digital visionary, a
transformational leader, an empathetic
communicator, a good facilitator, a great
listener, and an excellent digital game
changer.
Chapter 12 The CIO as “Chief Influence Officer”

12 CIO Personas
The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge
the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s
today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear
different personas and master multiple leadership and
management roles effortlessly.

Review
Would you recommend this book?
Write your review here.