This is the person in charge of the informatic management in an organization. This means that they have to design and conduct the strategy that will allow a proper work of the technology within the company. Their task is to look after the alignment of all the technological elements, physical and software, with the corporate strategy, and assure that they are really useful to the company in order to gain value through the speediness of communications.
The role of CIO is different form the IT manager; this last one has to assure that the daily operation is developed properly, this is, to fix devices, solve problems, help users, whilst the CIO is thinking in the general strategy the company will use to take advantage from technology. In the last years, one of the main challenges of CIO has been the management of Big Data:
Now the conversation isn’t about the application and whether the little button is green or blue—the conversation is about the data. Now IT and the business are speaking the same language. The users are much more comfortable talking about data than they are talking about applications, and so they are more willing to talk to IT and engage in meaningful conversations (Barlow, 2014).
For this reason, the role of CIO is gaining more importance, but their responsibilities and demands on them are also stronger. It is expected that today, a capable CIO will be able to manage the technological solutions for the management of businesses, as Business Intelligence or Business Process Management.