The Activities of the Chief Information Officer as Noted through Job Position Descriptions

The CIO is a relatively new executive management role that is considered to be on par with other “C” suite of executives— the CIO taking responsibility for a firm’s information technology (IT) capabilities in supporting organisational requirements. Executive management positions tend to embody four types of activities that address the important areas of organisational planning, organising, leading and controlling. Given the importance of the CIO position as an executive manager, this paper reports on research that documented CIO activities associated with planning, organising, leading and controlling— allowing the role to be documented and understood from what is commonly acknowledged as the four fundamental areas of management. A content analysis of a set of CIO job descriptions allowed 46 distinct CIO activities to be identified which allowed an overview of the position to be determined with internal-external focused organisational activities being observed. The paper is one of the first that notes the CIO activities from an executive management perspective and contributes to further understanding of the position.