What Does a Chief Information Officer Do?

The chief information officer (also known as CIO, is the abbreviation of Chief Information Officer) in Chinese means the chief information officer or information director, and is a senior official responsible for all areas of a company's information technology and systems. They support the company's goals by guiding the use of information technology. They have both technical and business process knowledge, and they have multifunctional concepts. They are often the best candidates to tightly integrate the organization's technology deployment strategy and business strategy. CIO originally meant the chief information officer in the government management department. As the information system evolved from an auxiliary tool in the back office to a powerful means to directly participate in the enterprise, the CIO emerged at the historic moment in the enterprise and became a pivotal figure. The chief information manager of a US company is the equivalent of a deputy general manager who is directly accountable to the highest decision maker.

Chief Information Officer

In the eyes of the western business community, CIOs are a new type of information manager. They are different from the heads of the general information technology department or information center, but have entered the highest decision-making level of the company and are equivalent to important officials in the position of vice president or deputy manager.

The CIO concept was first proposed not by the information industry, but by the business community. United States, 1981

The normal operation of modern enterprises depends on the smooth flow of logistics, capital flow and information flow, which is closely related to the process of enterprise informatization and business process reengineering. Chinese companies have begun to create the post of chief information officer. In people's impression, China's IT application market has always played a leading role in the two major industries of finance and telecommunications. According to statistics, the overall scale of China's banking informatization construction investment in 2001 was 26 billion yuan, and the overall market size of the telecommunications industry's informatization in the same year was 42.78 billion yuan.

Another statistic is that China s SME IT application market size in 2011 was as high as 82.07 billion yuan. This shows that China's IT application market has completely passed the era of large households and has really started to enter millions of small and medium-sized enterprises. Whether it is a traditional enterprise or a high-tech enterprise, it is not a simple matter to carry out information transformation. It will involve all aspects of the enterprise, and it will need to integrate all aspects of resources and plan from a strategic level. This requires a senior manager in the company who specializes in information systems.

The role of the chief information officer in an enterprise is closely related to the degree of enterprise informatization. Generally speaking, enterprise informationization can be divided into three stages. In the initial stage, the application of information technology was partial and relatively closed, and the main purpose was to improve labor productivity within the enterprise. In most enterprises in China, the earliest informatization department is the finance department.

First, familiarize yourself with the business processes of your industry. Different industries have different business processes. The CIO is best to have experience in related industries. For example, some CIOs heard

Strategic level

The CIO's responsibility is to mine enterprise information resources, formulate enterprise informationization strategies, rationally distribute enterprise informationization, and evaluate the value of informationization to enterprises.

The operation process of an enterprise, no matter which industry it is in, is actually a process of continuously generating, transmitting, analyzing and finally deleting information. Good management of information, in fact, is a good management of the operation of the enterprise. There is an old saying in China, "Know yourselves and know yourselves, you will never be overwhelmed in battle", which means the importance of information. You do nt know, I know; you know, I know more than you, know faster, so that I can win. For enterprises, a company can establish a competitive advantage by generating various operational data in a timely manner, passing it to the right people in a timely manner, performing timely and accurate analysis of various mass data, and ensuring the security and integrity of data.

Sort out the logic: the operation process of an enterprise is actually the process of information transfer; the establishment of a CIO in an enterprise is to manage information well; the purpose of managing information is to establish a competitive advantage and help the business succeed. Under this logic, the CIO's success criteria are actually very clear: whether it has helped the company build a competitive advantage and help the business succeed. The so-called problem of integration of IT and business should not exist at all, because CIOs are originally set up for business.