My CIO could learn a lot from all of these points. Excellent rundown!

CIOs as a class need to understand they're providing a service to the rest of the company. No company makes money on its internal IT. CIO's need to avoid the following:

a. Managing as if their own headcount was the measure of success.

b. Making end user lives harder for the convenience of their own staff.

c. Establishing draconian rules that keep users from doing what needs to be done, in the name of 'efficiency' or 'enterprise architecture'.

d. Assuming that, if it's from Microsoft, it's a good buy. Or assuming that, just because it's free to buy (e.g. Open Source), it'll also be free to sustain.

e. Assuming that consultants are smarter than your own IT staff, and assuming your IT staff understand user needs better than users.

f. Dissing the 'power user' communities, both within the developer shop and among end users.

g. Failing to consider -life-cycle- costs and indirect costs when comparing alternatives.

h. Considering 'HTML' a programming language.

i. Ignoring human factors in system development.

j. Treating QA as (1) annoying or (2) just the 'process police', ignoring the quality of the -product-.

All these are indications of CIOs that are at best clueless and more often actively harmful to their organizations. Unfortunately, that's the range of experiences I've had with CIOs ever since that job title became popular.

dave

My CIO boss has no idea how to use a RSS feed and sadly will never see this post.

dave just wrote a better article than you did, unfortunately he also just gave it away.

I like the Star Trek reference but I believe many CIOs are or were like you wish once upon a time. But reality set in.
The CEo only wants to see this quarter benefit, rarely do they want to see 3 years down the road benefits.
I would argue you get what you pay for. If your CEO hires someone who isn't very good, well, who do you blame? Usually this is what happens too.
Would I like to get a chance to lead a Public company as CIO? Sure do.
Will I? not likely as long as the CEO's keep wanting people that have doen x, y, z and in the past.
We live in today and we got here by being flexible and working with change, not by taking 5 years to install SAP.
Resources install products, employees create change and growth.

From the article:

4. The CIO is a technical dinosaur.
Unless you are running for president of the United States, experience does matter. Technology has changed since you were writing RPG on the mainframe umpteen years ago.
...

5. The CIO is ubergeeky.
Application developers respect a CIO who has deep technical knowledge, but your job is to lead, not to tell them how to architect systems, write code or tap an Ethernet coaxial cable ...

I haven't seen an Ethernet coaxial cable in at least a decade. How about switched Ethernet networks using either Cat5 or Cat6 type copper cable or fibre optic cable? It seems like the author of this article may still be a bit of a "technical dinosaur" although he does mention more recent developments like Ruby on Rails and multicore programming. Maybe he is just nostalgic about the days of Ethernet collisions.

Well any CIO would be wise be familiar with the concept of Heterarchy, or its big brother Triarchy.

People often mistakes having CIO is for the good of IT development. That's totally wrong! CIO is an expensive comfort for the almighty businessmen and all-in-control managements who recognise IT's important, but also recognise how little they can do on the outcome. In fact I doubt if there are many CEOs having the faintest idea on what's going on when their companies are praised for gaining an IT edge.

What is "tapping ethernet coax"?

"My CIO boss has no idea how to use a RSS feed and sadly will never see this post." >>

you made me laugh dude. create a dummy account and spam him like 50 times. cc your office mates including yourself once and do this outside your office and definitely not your home pc. hehehe. im pretty sure he doesnt have the skill to trace ips. :)

thank you for this article cio.com