From Technologist to Strategist

Of course, you can't blame the CEOs. It's primarily the CIO's responsibility to educate the business on the strategic value the role can bring. No one will hand that role to us because we're nice guys or because we made the network stay up 99.9 percent of the time. There are specific competencies that we need to develop and demonstrate consistently. (For more advice on improving alignment, see "How to Educate Your Business Leaders About IT")

To identify and help our peers hone these competencies, we urged the CIO Executive Council to take on this challenge in its Future-State CIO program. Over the past year, dozens of Council members have got together to map where we think the role is going. We've partnered with executive recruitment and talent appraisal firm Egon Zehnder International to define the essential C-level executive competencies and help us develop tools to assess and benchmark CIOs against those competencies. The nine C-suite competencies we're tracking are Strategic Orientation, Market Knowledge, Results Orientation, Team Leadership, Change Leadership, Commercial Orientation, Collaboration and Influence, Customer Impact and Organization Development.

As part of this commitment, the Council has joined with CIO magazine to bring you this new column. Each month, a different CIO will reflect on how he or she has developed, refined and applied a different competency in his or her business context.

We've all heard CIOs say: "We're not getting invited to the table." We used to say that too, and then we got tired of it. We decided to create our own table. Now it's up to all of us to make the most of that opportunity, to apply the right stuff as strategic, future-state CIOs.

Louis Ehrlich is vice president, services and strategy, and CIO, Global Downstream, with Chevron; Marc West is senior VP and CIO and general manager, commercial markets, at H&R Block. Both are board members of the CIO Executive Council (US)