The chief information officer (CIO) is a senior management job that first appeared in the late 1980s. It combines information technology know-how with all-round business skills.

Ideally a CIO can read a circuit diagram, debug programming code, navigate corporate accounts and understand the thrust of a marketing plan. Being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and stop a locomotive in its tracks don’t appear in any job description I’ve seen but they’d help.

CIO Magazine offers this mission statement prepared by the Gartner Group:

To provide technology vision and leadership for developing and implementing IT initiatives that create and maintain leadership for the enterprise in a constantly changing and intensely competitive marketplace.

It’s not a bad stab at defining CIO, but the words could apply to a kid hacking Linux out the back of an ice cream parlour.

In fact, Gartner’s statement could apply to anyone working in information technology with a smidgen of ambition. And  most enterprises regard their marketplace as constantly changing or intensely competitive.

Leadership, vision

I’m impressed Gartner managed to squeeze in leadership and vision. To me these are the important features distinguishing a good CIO from the dross. Leadership and vision is not about being the first company to sign up to a new initiative being pushed by one of the big technology vendors. It means standing up to snake oil merchants.

Likewise, CIO leadership and vision isn’t about blowing the budget on expensive new toys. Though some technology vendors use the words to imply exactly that. In their view visionaries spend money on their products regardless of whether they are proven or not.

And leadership most definitely is not about ploughing into heroic IT. The era of huge, unworkable mega-projects came to an end about the time the first CIOs appeared.

Companies recognise information technology is a tool to carry out the business plan. It is part of the CIO's job to harness IT and related knowledge resources towards the key business goals and are not an end in themselves.

Pinnacle of knowledge work

A CIO position in a large corporation is one of the pinnacles of knowledge-workerdom. It’s not necessarily the top knowledge worker job even for those knowledge workers with an IT background. Some CIOs have progressed to the CEO position, but the specialist nature of CIO work means such a move is unusual even in companies where the strategic application of technology and information tools lies at the very core of the business.

While some CIOs climbed to their position from technical careers in programming, systems analysis or even support, you don’t need to have an intensely technical background to reach this exalted position. That’s because in many case a CIO is more involved in applying technology to help an organisation reach is business goals than managing the technology on a day-to-day basis. That is why some people stepping into the CIO position and similar senior IT-related roles come from a user or application background.

Management education

If you do have a mainly technical background and you hope to step into a CIO role at some point, you’d be better off looking at expanding your management education and not your technical skills. Obviously an MBA will help more than Microsoft certification or any further IT qualifications. You’ll need a strong business orientation and in-depth experience working on commercial applications in a key industry.

It’s possible you arrived in IT management with a first degree in a non-technical or non-vocational subject. Some recruiters might recommend you to top up your technical education before shooting for an MBA as a stepping-stone to the CIO role. In my opinion, it makes more sense to gather technical expertise on the job and concentrate your formal education resources on that MBA. Having some major project success on your CV is more likely to impress potential employers than any formal IT qualification. Remember, CIO is more about strategy than hands on computing.

Not all top-ranked corporate IT professionals are CIOs. Directors of IT usually implement strategies on behalf of senior management. A Director of IT might give advice at the senior management level, but the job is primarily technical. On the other hand, the CIO role is more strategic. In some organisations the Director of IT reports to the CIO.

The rewards for successful CIOs can be enormous. Of course it does depend on the size of an organisation and the size of the job. There are CIOs working in Australia with salaries well in excess of A$500,000. Usually CIO positions involve more modest salary packages along with generous performance bonuses – possibly in the form of stock options.

It's a cliché to say half of today's job titles didn't exist a generation ago. But there is some truth in the statement. About one quarter of advertised job titles only appeared in the last decade or so.

We’re not just talking about those dumb name changes where say, a cleaner becomes 'hygiene facilitation operative'. Nor are we talking about BS job titles, (while we’re on the subject can you believe this bloke is serious?)

Thanks to the rise of the knowledge economy, the nature of work is morphing at warp speed to embrace new skills, services and functions as well as new combinations of more established skills. To illustrate this phenomenon I’ve selected ten job titles that came into fashion in the last twenty years but are already disappearing.

Web Master: In the early days of the Internet, the web master was a Jack (or Jill) of all trades, keeping the system running, maintaining data communications channels, designing pages, writing text, taking pictures and answering email feedback.

Today the nearest equivalent role has a broad range of definitions, but they all involve responsibility for running and developing web operations. The job may involve managing content, but, usually, a new breed of specialist handles this.

Content Producer: It didn’t take web career paths long to bifurcate. While the web master did everything, the content producer concentrated on words and pictures. This mainly involved writing and commissioning editorial, but it also included responsibility for finding pictures and other artwork as well as overseeing page designs. For a while the content producer was to web media what an editor is to a newspaper.

Evangelist: Apple Computer started employing evangelists in the mid-1980s as a way of rallying the faithful and keeping waverers on board during the competitive onslaught from Microsoft and Intel-based products. Their job was to ‘spread the good news’ by communicating with specialist communities such as designers, developers and other interest groups. Today a wide number of companies still employ people with this job title but it seems on its way out. In some respects evangelism is similar to public relations, but it tends to work more on a one-to-one basis and there’s an educative element involved. Some companies employ Advocates to do similar work.

Web Cam Performer: Ok, this one is a small niche, but for a short time before and after the dotcom boom there were people who earn a crust by living their lives in front of a web cam. In many cases it’s just a thinly veiled form of pornography, but some  were genuine artists. You don’t see them around any more though.

Outsourcing Consultant: The rise of virtual corporations brought in its wake a new class of management consultancy which specialised in brokering outsourcing arrangements and getting such deals to work. The job required a mixture of business, legal, financial and technical skills. You needed to be good with people and patient. Today outsourcing is mature (some would argue it is in decline) and there’s less need for specialists to broker deals.

Business Coach: Think of these as being like personal trainers, only instead of making people fit, they knock companies into shape. In many cases they bring in skills that a business operator lacks, particularly in a lean, mean new era virtual business where there aren’t too many bodies. Business coaches were extremely visible in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but they’re not so common today. My guess is this career has morphed into something else – but I don’t know what. Leave a comment if you know where they all went.

Professional Surfers: Keeping search engines and portal sites up-to-date requires a huge investment in time and money. Some of that investment hired people who working lives involved checking and rechecking web-site information. It isn't a high-paying job, but given that many people spend their whole working day browsing web pages anyway, it was popular for a while.

Chief Knowledge Officer: sitting at the top of the knowledge worker tree was a special breed of key executives who planned and implemented knowledge winning strategies for large corporations. Salaries were above $250k. In some cases the term was synonymous with Chief Information Office (CIO) but more generally there was a difference, while CIOs are technical and have to worry about technology issues, CKOs tended to have a more philosophical bent and are more worried about ‘why’ and ‘what’ than about ‘how’. I haven’t seen this job title in ages. Does that mean companies no longer need knowledge?

Piracy Specialists: Working on the principal of ‘silver lining in every cloud’ a whole range of jobs briefly emerged to deal with various on-line nasties. Among them were Disaster recovery specialists who cleared up the mess after virus and hacking attacks. Elsewhere companies like Microsoft hire piracy specialist to hunt down and deal with people who illegally sell software. More recently piracy specialists have found work for record companies and film studios worried about illegal on-line distribution. In recent years these roles have all been wrapped into more general security positions.