This research investigates what skills, behaviors and traits characterize an effective senior leader within information technology (IT) organizations. We explore specifically IT executives (a leader of leaders) who report directly to the Chief Information Officer. We conducted a qualitative study by interviewing 36 IT professionals using 360 ̊ approach to distill which competencies define an eff...

Ultimately, organizations invest in information technology (IT) initiatives to improve their level of performance. However, there have been mixed results from the payoff of IT investments. This article presents evidence that the variation in benefits derived from IT is in part due to the organization’s CIO leadership profile. This profile is determined by whether the CIO’s level of strategic de...

Though the importance of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) is well recognized in academic literature, concerns have often been expressed about the status of CIOs and their waning influence. In fact, not all firms choose to have Chief Information Officers (CIOs)as a part of their top management teams. This research investigates whether CIO presence/absence in top management teams affect firm per...

The overwhelming dependency on the organizational use of Information Technology (IT) during the last two decades of twentieth centaury has dramatically changed the way of working for the most of the business organizations. IT not only holds benefits for organizations and for their chief executives officers’ (CEOs) but has also caused difficulties for CEOs to optimize the computing resources. In...

A common and critical dilemma confronting enterprises today is how to ensure that they realize more value from their large-scale investments in IT and IT-enabled change. This article describes the choices made by the Dutch airline KLM to more fully engage its business managers in the governance of IT and the change-agent role played by a new CIO Office. The article identifies the benefits achie...

“The Enterprise Capability Organization: Future of IT” by Mark McDonald rightly emphasizes the need for managing enterprise capabilities for organizational maturity and agility. The proposed organization structure does bring together necessary resources to plan, implement, and maintain desired enterprise capabilities. The paper articulates that it requires senior management sponsorship, support...

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has become increasingly important for companies. However, one can perceive that this professional realizes that his/her competencies are not always enough to tackle a daily professional routine centered around the constant transformations the business arena has witnessed. Thus, by using the Social Representation Theory operationalized via the words evocation ...

Although recently several studies have addressed the required skills of effective CIOs, little is known of the actual behavior successful CIOs. In this study, we explore the behavior of highly effective CIOs by video-recording CIOs at work. The two CIOs videotaped were nominated as CIO of the year. We analyze the data in an innovative and systematic way by developing and using a behavioral lead...

The wide use of technology and the high technology innovation have arisen strategic opportunities from ICT investments. To support the strategic role of technology different ICT governance practices and frameworks have been designed. This paper makes a comparison between two case studies. The principal source of evidence has been the interview. It has been structured to evaluate the ICT governa...