How do CIO's Become Skilled Leaders? An Examination of their Social Media Profiles

Nowadays Information Technology (IT) has become crucial in the support, sustainability and growth of many contemporary organizations. In this regard, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) plays a pivotal role to ensure that investments in IT produce such expected outcomes. Consequently, the role of the CIO and his desired skills has become an important subject of study in the past decade. A topic which has remained largely unexplored relates to understanding the learning and development process which creates successful and highly skilled CIO's. In this regard, the profile of CIO's on social media sheds light on their most important skills and previous learning and development events such as: functional background, education and work experience. We tested the significance of these events in relation to the development of separate individual skills (e.g. the skill strategic planning, project management,.) and in relation to the average amount of skills which appeared in the CIO profile. Therefore, we examined social media data of 498 CIO's. This data was analyzed using text mining. We find that CIO's with a higher number of skills are positively associated with the following learning and development events: the MBA background, a large network, working experience in strategic planning, IT governance, information security management, project- and change management, work experience outside the IT department such as in procurement and logistics. Interestingly, we find no significant differences between CIO skills and tenure or professional backgrounds such as engineering, finance and computer science. The results suggest that CIO's acquire their skills through periods of extensive study followed by several repeated trials of hands-on experience. We provide important recommendations for professionals involved with the development of CIO skills.