CIO Competencies From the IT Professional Perspective: Insights From Brazil

The position of Chief Information Officer (CIO) has become increasingly important in companies. However, it can be perceived that this professional, whose functions are increasingly complex, realizes that his/her core competencies are not always sufficient to tackle the daily professional routine centered around the constant transformations the business arena has witnessed. Thus, by using Social Representation Theory operationalized by the Words Evocation Technique, this article sets out to investigate what the Brazilian IT professional perceptions about the CIO core competencies are, in order to compare them with the Brazilian CIO perceptions about his/her own competencies. The work concludes that in Brazil there is strong cognitive dissonance between those perceptions, as only the "capacity to influence the organization" and "technical expertise" competencies are perceived as being essential competencies for CIOs both by IT professionals and CIOs themselves. Lastly, the article highlights some managerial implications accrued from the results obtained.