The CIO Role Is Enough: Let’s Stop Reinventing It

In the growing alphabet soup of executive roles, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has become one of the most fashionable additions. In theory, it’s a role built to drive innovation, customer experience, and digital business models. But here’s the thing: we don’t need a new role to do that. We need to let the CIO do the job they were hired to do.

As the recent InformationWeek article on the rise of the CDO highlights, there’s still confusion about how this position intersects with the Chief Information Officer. But the core premise seems backward.

The CIO already has visibility into systems, data, architecture, and increasingly, product delivery. If empowered correctly, they’re fully capable of leading digital transformation.

Creating a new executive title often reflects a governance workaround, not a strategic necessity.

Why It Matters: Adding a Chief Digital Officer can unintentionally signal that the CIO isn’t trusted to lead digital evolution. Worse, it risks splitting accountability across silos just when digital transformation requires tighter alignment across tech, data, and experience. Instead of layering on new roles, companies should ensure the CIO role is modernized, strategically positioned, and given direct business influence. But here’s the critical caveat: if the CIO isn’t delivering on digital priorities, if transformation is stagnating or siloed under their leadership, the answer isn’t to work around them. It’s time for both the organization and the CIO to move on.

• Today’s CIOs already operate at the digital core of the business: The role of the CIO has evolved dramatically over the past decade. No longer limited to infrastructure and IT operations, CIOs lead cross-functional initiatives involving customer experience, AI, data analytics, and agile product delivery. They already serve as digital strategists and transformation agents. In many organizations, they’ve been the ones pushing for modernization. Creating a new executive role to own “digital” is often a solution in search of a problem, especially when the CIO already owns the systems and teams required to execute.

• Introducing a CDO without redefining governance creates fragmentation: Appointing a CDO without a tightly integrated reporting structure can lead to siloed strategies, duplicate investments, and internal competition for control over critical initiatives. Digital success requires seamless collaboration between platforms, data, product, and operations, which is difficult when different leaders have overlapping or conflicting mandates. Without clear decision rights, projects stall in bureaucracy. Keeping digital under the CIO allows for unified leadership, faster alignment, and more efficient delivery of outcomes.

• CDO roles can still exist, but under the strategic direction of the CIO: If organizations see value in having a leader focused exclusively on digital innovation, customer interfaces, or digital product development, that function can and should exist as part of a broader technology organization. The “CDO” title can be used to emphasize innovation priorities, but the role should report directly to the CIO, not operate independently. This structure preserves strategic alignment and avoids diluting technology governance across multiple power centers.

• Replacing the CIO with a CDO doesn’t solve the core issue: Too often, companies introduce a CDO because they feel digital initiatives are underperforming. But instead of diagnosing the root cause, lack of business-IT alignment, cultural resistance, or outdated funding models, they scapegoat the role of the CIO. The answer isn’t to bypass them. It’s to either empower them properly or replace them entirely. Partial fixes rarely deliver digital results.

• Customers care about outcomes, not titles or reporting lines: At the end of the day, what matters most to customers is whether digital experiences are intuitive, secure, and continuously improving. Whether that’s driven by a CIO, a CDO, or a blended team doesn’t matter to the end user. What does matter is that internal teams are aligned, responsive, and delivering value quickly. Fragmenting digital leadership across multiple executives introduces complexity that ultimately slows down the organization’s ability to meet customer needs, and that’s the real risk.

Final Thought

We don’t need more executive titles. We need more executive clarity and accountability. If the CIO is the right person for the job, they should lead the full digital agenda. If they’re not, companies must be willing to make a leadership change rather than build inefficient workarounds. Digital transformation requires conviction, not compromise.