There once was a time when there were no CIOs. In 1981, Bill Synnott, then vice president of data processing at the First National Bank of Boston, coined the phrase "chief information officer". And in my early days teaching at University of California, Los Angeles, I was very fortunate to have been involved in creating and delivering part of the first executive education curriculum aimed at this new animal in the executive forest.

Today there is no part of the enterprise - be it for-profit, not-for-profit or government - that is not touched, served and deeply impacted by the decisions and executions of the CIO. In a world dominated by information and information technologies, it is a mystery to me why the CIO remains one of the least understood and most unappreciated executives on the organisational chart.

After all, he is the individual most knowledgeable about - and held responsible for - the collection, distribution, use and storage of information, the most valuable asset in the world today. What's worse, CIOs, who in my opinion are ideally suited to play the role of hero in the information age, are portrayed as some kind of second-class corporate citizen and/or value villain.

Different strokes...

A quick survey of thought-leaders, scholars, practitioners and journalists who follow CIOs, conducted by the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College, generated the following spectrum of speculations about the future role of the CIO: 50% felt that "the role of the CIO [was] in inexorable decline"; a quarter thought that there would be "no change from the status quo"; and the other quarter believed that "the best days of the CIO lie ahead".

At first I was hard pressed to explain the discrepancy in opinion about the future role of the CIO. This was until I realised that the thoughts and conclusions of every analyst and CIO-wannabe are a function of the data they are looking at. The people seeing decline, stasis or career ascendancy were undoubtedly looking at different data points.

This surfaces an important and frequently overlooked reality - IT staff in general, and CIOs in particular, are not a homogenous tribe. There are (evidently) 10,000 CIOs in the Global 10,000; each and every one of them is different. Today, there exists no uniform measure for CIO competence; there is no secret executive factory stamping out post-analog Abraham Lincolns, cyber-Christopher Columbuses or multiplexed Machiavellis.

As such, it is quite logical that because a wide range of CIO capabilities exists in the market place, a correspondingly wide range of CIO futures exists. Some CIOs are among the finest executives on the planet; some are among the very worst. Indeed, IT has a deep and relatively unexplored leadership dark side.

Full speed ahead

I have spent the last two years* trying to understand what drives the rise or fall of a CIO. Regarding CIO role expansion, contraction or stasis, the data is unambiguous: great CIOs are seeing their roles expand. The not-so-great are seeing their jobs flatline and the merely average are heading for the career chipper. The kind of role a CIO plays in the enterprise and whether a CIO is a success or failure is directly attributable to what they and the IT organisation they lead know.

My former boss, the ur-futurist Alvin Toffler, was one of the first to observe and write eloquently about the fact that everything - everything - was accelerating. The nuanced implication of this reality in IT was that not only were things accelerating, they were doing so at different rates.

There was huge potential for de-synchronisation, so servers were evolving at one speed, software at another, and organisational capacity to assimilate change, storage and networks at yet another. The CIO was the person who had to understand [ie know] and modulate the speeds of all the pieces of an increasingly complex technology infrastructure. Such speed management cannot be accomplished without a map.

Great CIOs have great maps. They have mastered four must-know "New Knows":
1. Where are we?
2. Where do we want to go (ie what are our options - strategically)?
3. How do we get there (ie what are our options - tactically)?
4. How do we convince the enterprise to make the trip?

The new economy

Seth Godin, in his new book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, writes: "We are moving from an economy that used to make money by leveraging a factory, a system, a process, to an economy where the people who win do so by doing stuff we didn't expect and didn't ask for." Translated to the IT space, one infers that indispensable CIOs use maps to tell us things we didn't know and stimulate us to go to places we didn't know existed.

CIOs who tend machines or wait for others to tell them what to build and where to build it are a thing of the past. CIOs with expanding roles are explorers who use the power of analytics (forecasting, operations research, data integration, data mining, reporting and statistics) to chart a fact-based path to a very exciting future.

* Thornton May has undertaken a two-year, 60-city, multinational exploration of the "State of the CIO", with the aid of some of the world's largest IT organisations, universities and business schools.

Acclaimed futurist Thornton May is dean of the IT Leadership Academy at Florida State College, Jacksonville and a professor at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. A renowned commentator and CIO coach, his latest book, The New Know, explores the basis of successful leadership.

• For more on wider roles for CIOs, see our in-depth report.