How to Become a Public-Sector CIO

The role of the public-sector CIO is more crucial than ever, but there's no tried-and-true way to prepare for it.

"You don't go to school and say, 'I want to grow up and be a CIO or a CTO," said Alan Shark, the executive director of the Public Technology Institute (PTI) in Washington, D.C.

So how do professionals get on the road that leads to the public CIO's chair?

There might not be a typical career path for CIOs, but there's a prevalent one, said Liza Lowery Massey, CEO of The CIO Collaborative, a Las Vegas-based consultancy. "Most CIOs today rise through the ranks of IT," she said. Massey, a former Los Angeles CIO, started as a software specialist and went on to gain broad IT experience.

In the past, state CIOs tended to rise through the ranks of government, said Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). But these days, a growing number of them cross over from the private sector, and in this manner arrive with a different set of credentials. "They have much more of a strong business background, and they may not have been involved in pure computer science," Robinson said. "Many of them have MBAs [master's of business administration]."

In fact, some CIOs come to the job with no formal education in IT at all. Take the example of Patrick Schambach, who served as deputy CIO at the Secret Service and CIO at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Transportation Security Administration. He holds business degrees and started his career with the Secret Service as an accountant.

"I knew enough about technology to be dangerous, but I don't consider myself a technologist," said Schambach, now Nortel Government Solution's senior vice president and general manager of e-Government and Infrastructure Services in Fairfax, Va.

According to Schambach, it was his ability to understand his organization's business imperatives that made him CIO material. His rise to the Secret Service's deputy CIO offers a prime example. "I could relate to the mission side of the organization, which are not technologists -- especially gun carriers in law enforcement," he said. "They wanted someone who knew the mission well and could bring technology to bear against that mission."

Schambach's accounting background also stood him in good stead. "Because of that initial experience I had in the financial area, I knew how the budget worked. I knew how to get funding lined up years in advance before the need came," he said.

A grounding in technology is important, but it's not enough, said Allan Grossman, senior partner with A. Davis Grant & Co., an Edison, N.J.-based executive search firm specializing in information systems and technology. "Today the CIO clearly needs more of a background in general business than he or she did 20 years ago."

Massey has an acid test for distinguishing between mere "techies" and real CIOs. "I always say, 'If you know the version number of the operating system running on your mainframe, you're probably not a CIO,'" she said. Except in very small organizations, a CIO rarely gets involved in that level of detail, she explained. The aspiring CIO needs to make the leap from being a technologist to being a strategist and must learn the language of business. "You have to be seen as a peer working for the good of the organization, not as the chief geek," she said.

CIO as Translator
Shark, who said he has interviewed about 300 government CIOs in the last couple of years, agreed that a CIO must speak two languages. "I'm seeing a big shift from issues that were purely technology to issues having much more to do