1.The head of the IT group in a company often is called the chief information of
ID: 3550133 • Letter: 1
Question
1.The head of the IT group in a company often is called the chief information officer
(CIO) or chief technology officer (CTO). Should the CIO or CTO report to the
company president, to the finance department, where many of the information
systems are used, or to someone or somewhere else? Why would it matter?
2.
Contact at least three people at your school or a nearby company who use information
systems. List the systems, the position titles of the users, and the business functions
that the systems support.
Explanation / Answer
1)
There are considerable variations in the composition and responsibilities of corporate titles.
Within the corporate office or corporate center of a company, some companies have a Chairman and CEO as the top ranking executive, while the number two is the President and COO; other companies have a President and CEO but no official deputy. Typically, C-level managers are "higher" than Vice Presidents, although many times a C-level officer may also hold a vice president title, such as Executive Vice President and CFO. The board of directors is technically not part of management itself, although its chairman may be considered part of the corporate office if he or she is an executive chairman.
A corporation often consists of different businesses, whose senior executives report directly to the CEO or COO. If organized as a division then the top manager is often known as an Executive Vice President (for example, Todd Bradley who heads the Personal Systems Group in Hewlett Packard). If that business is a subsidiary which has considerably more independence, then the title might be Chairman and CEO (for example, Philip I. Kent of Turner Broadcasting System in Time Warner).
In many countries, particularly in Europe and Asia, there is a separate executive board for day-to-day business and supervisory board (elected by shareholders) for control purposes. In these countries, the CEO presides over the executive board and the chairman presides over the supervisory board, and these two roles will always be held by different people. This ensures a distinction between management by the executive board and governance by the supervisory board. This seemingly allows for clear lines of authority. There is a strong parallel here with the structure of government, which tends to separate the political cabinet from the management civil service.
In the United States and other countries that follow a single-board corporate structure, the board of directors (elected by the shareholders) is often equivalent to the European/Asian supervisory board, while the functions of the executive board may be vested either in the board of directors or in a separate committee, which may be called an operating committee (J.P. Morgan Chase),[1] management committee (Goldman Sachs), executive committee (Lehman Brothers), or executive council (Hewlett-Packard), composed of the division/subsidiary heads and C-level officers that report directly to the CEO.
Ever wondered when the first CIOs graced the halls of Australian corporations? Some arrived in the early 1990s with the birth of open systems hardware and the arrival of the first enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
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