Survey shows that 25% of IT leaders are ‘digital’ CIOs

There’s a lot of talk these days about “digital” initiatives, which tend to be treated separately from plain-old information technology work.  But are the two really so different? Yes, says CIO’s Maryfran Johnson, who just presented the results of CIO magazine’s “13th annual State of the CIO” study, which reveals “stark contrasts between traditional CIOs who focus more on internal operations and digital CIOs who expand IT’s influence externally to work directly with customers and business colleagues.”

In our 13 years of conducting our annual State of the CIO survey, we’ve never seen anything quite like this year’s results. Our profession has become a house divided, with traditional service-provider CIOs on one side and business-focused, digital-strategist CIOs on the other. “As we plow through this period of digital disruption, where established rules for competing may no longer apply, some CIOs now question what they want for themselves,” Managing Editor Kim S. Nash writes in our cover story (“State of the CIO 2014: The Great Schism“). “The profession is changing fast in an atmosphere where colleagues sometimes look upon a traditional IT group as a hindrance to corporate success.”