One Country, Three Types of CIOs: The Emergence of Technology Executives in China

In this research, we investigated the differences in the roles and responsibilities across the CIO´s job across three main regions of one country - China. In particular, we studied how CIOs of Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan varied across the regions. We found that the roles and responsibilities of China´s CIOs were influenced by the region´s government strategy and the maturity of its technology infrastructure. Our second finding was that the degree to which a CIO´s ability to evolve his/her roles and responsibilities is constrained/supported by the ability to collaborate with the government´s infrastructure and to access technological resources. And our third finding was that a CIO´s exposure to global business partner´s operations, technologies, and processes facilitated the need for the executive to further develop and mature their roles and responsibilities. CIOs roles have evolved to reflect the information systems (IS) infrastructure and strategy of their own firms, leading to two versions of the role: one, an executive-level manager who is focused on the firm´s strategy and processes; the other a technical manager focused on minimizing costs by rationalizing and leveraging the existing IS infrastructure. The degree to which a firm has standardized its IS architecture infrastructure and the degree to which IS enables core products, services, processes, or competitive advantage of the firm impacts the nature of the role.