Understanding CIO Role Effectiveness: The Antecedents and Consequents

This research-in-progress paper describes the development of a research model exploring the antecedents and consequents of CIO role effectiveness. Specifically, we argue that CIO managerial discretion (the latitude of actions available to CIOs), CIO capability (business knowledge, IT knowledge, political savvy, and communication skill), and CIO/CEO shared understanding of IT role in the organization are important antecedents of CIO role effectiveness. In addition, we posit that an effective CIO will increase the contribution of IS function to the firm in terms of strategic, operational and financial impacts. The paper also outlines a proposed CIO/CEO matched-pair field survey method to test the research model