Admitted poor presenter who never took a presentation class, John Siefert, VP and Publisher of Information Week, gave one of the best presentations today at the partner conference, Fusion ‘07, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Entitled “Redefining the CEO”Sieffert hammered home CIOs’ realization that customer satisfaction, the business customer not the company’s servers, are core to the CIO’s job role. While CIOs have already evolved to understanding their business, the days of a non-technical CIO being a more strategic CIO no longer holds true. The CIO has to play the role of the great translator. Some summary items from Sieffert’s presentation:

• The CIO’s influence across the enterprise is starting to rise. Almost 80% of CEO’s agree that CIOs must be involved in most important corporate decisions (source: Forrester).
• CUNA Mutual Group had to change the IT department’s mission statement to read: “Helping our customer to be more successful.”
• Sieffert recommends taking your customer out to lunch to learn more about their business issues.
• Business growth will happen through customer and business IQ. Use customer/business data to influence new products and services and drive growth.
• Self starter Mykolas Rambus, CTO of Forbes said, “I believe that today’s CIO will be tomorrow’s COO and possibly the future CEO.” Rambus started his first company when he was sixteen.
• Operations are the new innovations.

In addition, Sieffert showed off a couple of videos that Information Week has posted online as a part of their series “CIOs Uncensored.”

These videos change all the time, but make sure you check out the video of Tony Scott, CIO of Disney Corporation who believes that CIOs must be comfortable with change but more importantly they need to really understand both their technology and business. Click on the icons below.