Are you the perfect chief information officer (CIO)? And if not, why not? The brutal answer is that you may never be, through no fault of your own. You are more likely to be one of the majority of IT managers who, though they may be at the top of the internal IT tree, are effectively stuck, and will still be reporting to the finance director in 10 years and will never quite reach that all-elusive place on the board.

‘I’d say it’s an 80-20 split between the old-style IT manager and the genuine CIO,’ says John Chaplin, formerly European CIO for Visa who now acts as a consultant to financial services firms and runs a marketing communications agency.

‘Maybe 75-25, though that’s a stretch. The reality is there just aren’t that many real CIOs, people who can bridge IT and the business. Remember a decade ago when we said the IT manager was headed for the board? Only about 10 per cent got there, and I can’t see that changing quickly.’

This would not matter were it not for the growing question of if the IT department is needed at all – at least internally.

Analyst Gartner argues that the IT leader of today and tomorrow will spend most of his or her time working with external suppliers, rather than managing huge internal teams. For instance, in June, speaking at the firm’s Mid-Sized Enterprise Summit, Gartner fellow Tom Austin predicted that, though some elements of the IT role can never be effectively outsourced, by 2015 between 40 to 90 per cent of what is currently done in-house with technology will be performed by external third parties.

It is not the end of the IT department as we know it, but it is certainly drastic enforced evolution if Gartner is right (see story, here). A huge proportion of IT infrastructure work is likely to be automated (between 80 and 90 per cent) and the rest outsourced. As much as 50 per cent of IT administration, as in budget, project and risk management work, could go the same way, joining help desk and training services (between 40 and 50 per cent) and application development and maintenance (between 50 and 70 per cent).

‘It’s a matter of “wake up and smell the coffee”,’ says John Blackwell, a human resources (HR) consultant and head of John Blackwell Associates.

‘The parallel is with HR. Do you want a heavy-duty, expensive HR director who spends all day worrying about managing the pension scheme, or do you just outsource the pension management – followed soon after by him?’ he asks.

It is remorseless business logic driving this process, adds Blackwell.

‘All firms are venture capitalists now – they have to see the return on each and every project,’ he says. ‘They feel they are in an increasingly volatile and competitive environment. They are just not interested in hearing about infrastructure. They want to work with people who can handle any curve ball they are thrown, who can make the business flex to the peaks and troughs they are enduring, and who can contribute.’

The challenge is that only the individuals who are really rising to this challenge can call themselves CIOs – let alone perfect ones. It is certainly a testing time to be a head of IT, and so a certain amount of navel-gazing and poor self-esteem can perhaps be forgiven.

‘We talk about IT as a young profession but it’s not really; it’s 50 years old now,’ says Michel Kahn, group IT director at Specsavers Optical Group, the world’s largest private optical retailer, which reported a £620m turnover for 2004 and projects £750m for 2005. ‘But we in IT have acquired some historical baggage, especially in the way we have become so fond of jargon, something that I think has become totally entrenched.’

Kahn has been a part of the growth of the company, which has ballooned from just under 300 stores when he joined in 1996 to nearly 800 now. He heads a team of 100 employees dedicated to working closely with shop staff, clinical professionals and senior managers, meaning that ‘we recognise their issues and they recognise ours.’ Kahn is also one of the minority of IT executives who have made it all the way to the board – one of Chaplin’s 10 to 15 per cent.

For Kahn – who in November was declared joint winner of the Daily Telegraph’s IT Director of the Year in its annual Business Awards – another part of the baggage is that: ‘We also seem very fond of changing our job titles, from data processing manager to IT director to CIO. That’s odd because you don’t see our peers in finance, sales or marketing feeling they need to do that. Is there an attempt at self-justification and proving to ourselves that we’re important going on here?’ he says.

Another worry is the continuing neurosis about IT’s relevance to the business.

‘All this talk about alignment with business objectives; you never hear the marketing director talking like that,’ says Kahn. ‘The issue really is integration with business goals. The problem is that at board level the issue isn’t about the complexities of technology but very, very simple questions. What can this bring to the business? If you can’t take part in that discussion people will look at you and wonder, so what is it you do?’

There are genuine question marks over the status and direction of the CIO in many sectors. At the annual conference for local government IT user group Socitm in October, Jos Creese, head of IT at Hampshire County Council and chairman of the organisation’s Insight research arm, said it was time to bid farewell to the IT manager and say hello to the CIO. But he added that filling the role is a huge leap from where many people are now.

‘There are less than 10 per cent of all IT leaders in any sector with the CIO job title – and none at all in UK local government,’ he says. ‘Do titles matter that much? Well, they do. Think of what “head of transformation and technology” would mean as a description of what we do, for instance.’

Creese’s theory is that IT has fallen into a range of standard roles as seen by peers. ‘You may be the anorak – excited by the technology alone; the salesman – who says trust me and spend more; or maybe the person wearing the flak jacket, because they are always either on the defensive or attack. But you may also be seen as the faceless suit, wanting to be on the board but not really accessible; or even the exhibitionist – making a lot of noise about how much you contribute,’ he says. ‘Generally the rest of the business thinks you’re a pain in the rear, incidentally. And finally you’re often Captain Scarlet – indestructible and with superhuman powers. Actually you have to be all of these, which is why IT is the hardest job in local government apart from the chief executive role itself.’

Any CIO, from whichever background, will surely recognise this list of requirements as laid out by Socitm for the technology business leader: technical manager, relationship and supplier manager, strategy and policy consultant, and business change leader. The modern CIO needs it all.

‘You have to be all this as well as innovative, a good deal broker, a team player, a technology version of Paul Daniels and whiz kid, as well as an advocate for your organisation’s mission. The right top-level support is also vital,’ says Creese.

Sounds like a bridge too far? Nobody is suggesting you can get there in one mighty bound. It is a career’s worth of work in many ways. The journey needs to start with a commitment to open up to the realities of the environment in which you operate.

Specsavers’ Kahn is just one of many successful CIOs who are committed believers that today and tomorrow’s IT leader has to have a broad understanding of business issues, one that is demonstrable in the board-level conversation. ‘IT can’t position itself as a silver bullet solution any more, but as an integral and contributing part of the overall company,’ he says.

It is undeniable that the IT leader who gains the respect of his or her organisational peers is the one that flourishes in today’s environment. Rod Matthews is IT head at Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, though his formal job title is head of information society technologies. He is one of the new breed of CIO who has combined a range of business and technical roles always tied to the main business of the organisation – in his case local government.

‘The key deliverable for the CIO has to be the ability to do “relational” thinking – able to make connections and spot opportunities for the business,’ says Matthews. ‘In many ways training such as systems analysis is a good background for that.’

Matthews is also one of the more business-focused CIOs who have decided to obtain formal training from an MBA.

‘But note that I chose to do an MBA, not an MSc,’ he says. ‘There’s a contrast between the technical specialist who narrows down the question and the business guy who wants to open it up and sees things from the wider perspective. I think today’s CIO really needs to do the latter.’

But not everyone is a fan of formal education to make CIOs more business-credible. Deepak Singh, executive vice president in the Business Excellence team at communications firm T-Mobile – see story, here – says success comes in the form of achievement, not study.

‘It’s not about education and letters after your name, but about being seen to be working with the business,’ he says.

Yet there can be a training aspect to moving nearer CIO perfection that is often not pursued by IT professionals, and that is the option of consulting a business coach. In her 10 years of corporate business coaching, Anna Barez-Brown, who has worked with clients such as BP, Citibank, AOL and AstraZeneca, says she has never had an IT delegate on her sessions.

‘This could be that, in the past at least, IT didn’t see itself in the same way as sales people – as driven to perform and increase market share or other metrics,’ she says. ‘That needs to change – if for no other reason than that IT needs a higher profile. IT is also now more sales driven itself; what else is service delivery than that?’

If you are still sceptical, reflect on why all of your business peers have been taking such development opportunities.

‘What I teach is really ways of interacting with others, of developing skills to be more effective communicators, to find the language to really listen and talk to others,’ says Barez-Brown.

‘IT people can end up too sunk in their own worlds and bad at keeping up to date with the rest of the company.’ The lesson has to be if you can’t beat them, join them.

So, what is the perfect CIO profile? If this could be defined successfully there would be a clearer idea of what the specifics of the candidate profile are, and how near or far the Computing Business reader is from that target. It is possible to write an idealised perfect CV – see here – but what is certain is that the perfect CIO needs to talk the same language as everyone else in the boardroom.

The next step is bringing to bear on business problems the mental rigour from working with technology. ‘The head guy wants a list of steps to achieve success, the optimum way forward and all its dependencies. Pointing out consequences is as useful to him as positive actions,’ says Kahn.

But do not spell out the messy details. Kahn says that he never talks about the technology aspect of the business plan, only the business part of it. ‘The company takes it as read that I have a competent, professional IT team to get the technical details correct,’ he says.

Why make the effort? Why aspire to do all these difficult things? One answer is there is clearly opportunity for the plucky. Gartner’s research suggests a huge increase in outsourcing core IT functions, but intriguingly it also suggests a much more strategic IT role afterwards. A majority, some 55 to 75 per cent, of top-level IT strategy could survive, while a whole new category of relationship management initiatives could also emerge, some of which will be provided by the business, but a lot from IT.

‘Technology is incredibly relevant – indeed critical – to the future of all organisations as a driver of change and innovation. But is everyone at IT director level up to the challenge of helping to deliver that?’ asks Specsavers’ Kahn.

Out of this challenge comes a real – indeed ‘perfect’ – opportunity. In the words of Chaplin: ‘The IT manager will be outsourced almost entirely in the next 10 years. CIO wBut the true ill never be, and could never be.’