Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Drazen Drazic
This is far from my first post on the role of the CIO. While most posts have been focused on the [CIO] failures to fully understand the role of Information Security professionals and the industry in general, many [posts] have also looked at the fundamental failures of CIOs and their roles in business. The two are interdependent.
Somewhere around the late 90s, this “CIO” title started to became the role “title” of choice for the most senior IT person in the organisation. Out went “IT Director”, “IT General Manager” and similar titles, and in came the trend of “CIOs” starting to consider themselves business people. Now at the time, most CIOs were IT people and drawing that long bow to be now viewed by their own staff as “business people”, created one of the major turning points.
This has been a catalyst for leading our industry into more than 10 years of little change in regards to significant IT development, better security, and to an extent, relatively effective control of IT in a business, any potential, and most importantly, understanding and forceful commitment to the emerging Information Security industry and the rising impacts of the latter to business. Is this the reason good information security adoption has lagged, and to many extents, is just plainly non-existent in many organisations?
Taking this deeper, without that critical mass of acceptance at that senior level – the representative voice of IT to the business and flow-on effects to society as a whole has failed. Accountability means little to nothing in the overall scheme of things pertaining to longer term strategy – “Governance” in IT security overall would be deemed a failure. Risk Management across an enterprise from a holistic view is a failure. (In silos, there are some successes but what overall benefit if the business as a whole has no business-wide understanding of itself). Without this review and the most basic and potential root cause analysis and planned treatment of the root causes, we have the lack of progress, (though some would call total failures)….should we expect to be in a better position now or in the short term future?
Part II will look at more detailed analysis of the CIO in business and their relation to IT Security. Thanks to Donal for this one:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/04/thoughts-on-the-state-of-the-cio.html
Why aren’t CIO’s competences being analysed from within their own departments? While I know so many good CIOs, I’ve met far more who are out of the their league and you wonder what they really know. If they want to be “C-level” people, they need to be more scrutinised in the same way as CEOs and CFOs (even though we know that is also far from ideal a lot of the time)..
Stay tuned for Part II
Posted in Bad Stuff, Dumb Security, Risk Management, Uncategorized, Vulnerability Management, WTF, cyber crime, governance | 1 Comment »
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