Exploring the relationships between CIO competencies and company performance

Nowadays, most researchers and practitioners agree in considering the correct management of information as a powerful competitive force. The focus of top managers has progressively shifted towards “information” as an asset that can be exploited to increase the overall company performance. As a consequence, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) role has been dramatically changing, both in terms of increasing importance, and in terms of the mission to achieve: the new role of CIO is to exploit information to gain a competitive edge and to promote information culture throughout the firm, from top managers to most of operative roles. Thus, the CIO needs competencies, therefore professional training and formative path suitable for the new requirements [10][34]. Starting from a detailed analysis of the literature regarding the business activities involving the Information System (IS) area, this work aims at identifying the most important competencies required by a CIO in order to effectively exploit the opportunities offered by new technologies and therefore to support the achievement of better company performance (CP). More precisely, the aim of this work is to validate the commonly agreed importance of CIO role and therefore to verify the relationships between CIO competencies and CP, by taking into account the different organizational characteristics and the peculiarities of the competitive environment in which companies work. To do so, it is preliminary necessary to collect information from previous studies, in order to draw up the most accurate and updated list of CIO competencies. Then, it is necessary to verify whether CIO competencies suggested by literature are actually able to influence the overall CP. On one hand, the fast ICT innovation could drive the need of technical abilities; on the other hand, the company peculiarities could lead to substantially different requirements. Finally, it is reasonable to assume the existence of different ICT requirements in different contexts: even the relationships between CIO competencies and CP could vary according to the company peculiarities and the specific environment it deals with (such as company size, turnover, market area...)