This paper is an exploratory study to determine various methods for evaluating the performance of a chief information officer (CIO) in a business organization. The paper is organized as following: (a) role of a CIO in an organization, (b) essential qualities for a CIO to succeed, (c) how does a CIO 'contribute' in an organization, (d) how to evaluate the performance of a CIO, and (e) summary.

A CIO is a senior management position in an organization reporting to the highest management echelon within the organization like the CEO, COO, CFO, President or Vice President. Ideally, CIO's broad role is to ensure availability of infrastructure, design systems to integrate various information resources, business processes within and outside the organization in order to achieve business objectives, "define information to be used in the organization, set information policy and standards and maintain management control over all information resources." (Davenport, T.H., 1995, 15th May, Computer World)

In order to evaluate the performance of a CIO, it is necessary to understand the 'contribution' a CIO is expected to make in an organization. It would be fair to say that in a modern organization, the CIO's main contribution is in terms of 'creating' business opportunities for the organization by integrating the business model, business processes and physical and information resources of the company with innovative application of information technology. For all practical purpose, he is a key decision-maker along with the CEO, CFO or COO and his main objective is to enhance the business interests of the organization. As such it requires the CIO to take initiatives in order to make the IS department play a more proactive role in contributing towards the company's business goals rather than focussing only on the secondary function of providing "support" in terms of uptime and systems delivery.

It is very difficult to have sound "quantitative and qualitative performance dimensions to evaluate a CIO"(1999, 12th April, http://www.msdev.com) or for that matter any upper management executive. There are so many "intangibles" (Koch, C., 1996, 15th February, CIO magazine) involved while trying to measure a professional's overall contribution to the company (not to mention the "tangible" factors) that it is very difficult to evolve a 'fail proof' scale to measure contribution of a professional in quantitative terms. "Traditional evaluation measures like downtime and systems delivery are being augmented by performance measures that are difficult to quantify anywhere but in the minds of the others sitting in the executive suite." (Koch, C., 1996, 15th February, CIO magazine). The best way to evaluate the performance of senior executive like a CIO is to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative criterion. Such an approach, while not being perfect, may still provide the mo!

The task of evaluating the CIO's performance in an organization is very complex simply

ic actions on behalf of the corporation.

Clerk. As a 'clerk', " the CIO ensures that the corporation effectively and efficiently processes business transaction data and other routine information." The databases and application being used in the organization fully support " core corporate operations such as finance, marketing, customer service, and procurement." Data sharing among the organizations internal and external customers in order to share and exchange business information with external clients and business partners must be ensured (Buckholtz, T.J., 1996, 18th March, Computer World).

Executive. In his role as an executive, "the CIO earns profits for the organization or at least serve as a fully contributing member of the senior management team. The top management "should benefit from CIO's significant contribution both to decisions that feature IT resources and systems and to decisions that do not." This is the key role the CIO plays in an organization by suggesting new business opportunities, enhancing processes, enhancing decision making abilities of decision makers, and creating products and services within the organization that earns profits to the organization by being sold to external clients, customers and suppliers (Buckholtz, T.J., 1996, 18th March, Computer World).

Analyst. " CIO's responsibilities as an analyst include suggesting and evaluating corporate opportunities, including opportunities to design or change products and processes outside the C

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Approximate Word count = 2328
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)