A few years ago, every company hired a Chief Digital Officer. More recently, the role has been eliminated or merged. Has the CDO role outlived its usefulness?
In the mid-2010s, news organizations and consulting firms announced the arrival and critical importance of the role of Chief Digital Officer. Consultancy McKinsey called it the “head of the transformer,” equal to mainstream media channels announced the role as vital and sustainable.
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More recently, instead of gushing press releases announcing newly minted CDOs, the role became the “Chief to disappear Officer” if companies quietly combine or remove the role.
Is the disappearance of the CDO a good thing?
One theory about the growing scarcity of the CDO is that it was designed that way. The CDO role was often billed as a transformational role, which would help companies understand and thrive in the digital age. Transformation naturally involves an event with a beginning and an end, and many have suggested that truly transformational CDOs were successful when they made their own jobs redundant.
This argument has some merit, as the CDO role has often been heralded as closing the gap between technology, led by the CIO, and other corporate roles. CIOs were judged to be too focused on technology, an accusation true based on the number of voices clamoring for alignment between IT and business units. CDOs are designed to connect these different parts of the organization and help business leaders understand the technology, while pushing IT first as a facilitator and later as a partner.
The global pandemic appeared to have accelerated this fusion of technology, business and transformation. We were all forced to endure months of transformation, quickly adapting technology to business needs to keep our teams, organizations and businesses afloat.
In this positive reading of the case of the disappearing CDO, these individuals have essentially accomplished their missions, perhaps even speeding up the endgame with the pandemic forcing transformation to even the most calcified organizations.
Or is losing the CDO a good thing?
The less charitable view of the demise of the CDO role in many organizations is that it was often created in response to a market trend, but a role was without a clearly defined remit and without any authority to execute. There are certainly cases of organizations that have hired a talented individual, given them a title and then actively blocked every effort they have made to transform their organization.
In other cases, CDOs were entranced by the cool technology and shiny objects. Like trendy fashionistas, these folks grew weary when their solution to every problem involved an expensive and often untried technical investment that quickly went out of fashion before measurable results were demonstrated.
An evolution instead of a revolution
CIOs and CTOs have also become more business-like in most organizations, while their colleagues outside of IT have become more technically proficient. Gone are the days when managers could laugh at not reading their emails or participating in a video call. Technology-led transformation has become part of everyone’s job description, rather than a special assignment for a unique C-level role.
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This evolution is a natural consequence of sustainable business trends. We’re likely to see the latest batch of new C-level roles ranging from Chief Sustainability Officers to Chief Diversity Officers gradually fade as these considerations move from unique and new to a core component of business as usual.
Could the CIO be next?
As technology becomes increasingly embedded in business as usual, could the Chief Information Officer be the next role to gradually disappear into the history books? Trends like cloud computing and hybrid networking have made a keeper of the technology kingdom-esque CIO less and less relevant, at least as a C-level position.
However, the most influential CIOs generally combine the ability to identify, understand and apply emerging technology trends with the ability to manage what is often a vast investment portfolio under the guise of technical infrastructure and ongoing projects. These two areas need to be understood and applied in the context of how they benefit the wider business, a divide that has created the need for a CDO in many organizations.
If you’re not actively engaged in these spaces and most of your day is spent worrying about operational issues, it may be worth reassessing your priorities.
