ABSTRACT
With all that experience, Wright is in a good position to help us with our quandary: Why don’t more boards appoint CIOs?
With the pace of technology change at an all-time high, and with 20-something CEOs making billions of dollars on technology start-ups, we forget that boardrooms are still populated by executives in their mid-sixties. “During their tenure as corporate executives, these people had an arm’s length to IT,” says Wright. “Many experienced IT as a necessary evil during a time when the business would throw the order over the wall to IT. Board members still have this very dated and inaccurate view of the CIO being too technical, not having good communication skills, and not being able to talk in business terms. That’s a really old perspective, but because of the age of the sitting board members, that’s what they remember, and those biases die hard.”
