More and more companies need to leverage the web and other channels to sell and CIOs have an increasingly important role to play in Product Innovation and Strategy. You also need Product designers and Marketers to be an important part of Product Inovation and Strategy. This is ideally done by a cross-function team.

Who leads such a team and is accountable for it in a specific organisation needs to be decided within that organisation’s context. You will need some one who would be a champion for the new product/innovation/strategy and will be willing to drive it internally.

Secondly, I appreciate the link to my post that addresses this issue. I actually think we are mostly in agreement, but that we differ in degree. While I see the CIO in a consultative role to the production/operations side of the business, I think you would allow the CIO to take direct ownership of those roles. The CIO is still providing the crucial knowledge in terms of technical savvy, but the responsibility component has changed.

I’ve had some long and quite valuable conversations around this, driven by my blog post and others. This is a clear point of discussion among CIOs, and I think is affected by our companies as well. Technology companies are more comfortable with your view of the multi-hatted CIO; non-tech companies seem to like the single hat model.

As we shared separately, this would make a great CIO panel discussion sometime!