An Exploratory Study on the Influencers of the Perceived Relevance of CIO's Activities

2. Literature Review

The literature review was conducted from two major sources of information: the community of practitioners, including the CIO Magazine in its yearly study “The state of the CIO” and Gartner in its yearly study “The CIO Agenda Report”; and the academic community, including Web of Science, Scopus and ScienceDirect. The main search expressions used were “CIO activities,” “IS managers activities,” “CIO roles,” “IS managers roles,” “CIO characteristics,” “IS manager characteristics,” “CIO profile” and “IS manager profile”.

CIOs play different roles and functions in organizations (Gottschalk, 2002; Wu et al., 2004): Leader (e.g.: hiring, developing and managing the IT staff); Connection (e.g.: making a bridge between top management and IT professionals, as well as maintaining a network of contacts with clients and suppliers); Monitor (e.g.: managing projects and application development); Spokesperson (e.g.: representing the company in social events); Entrepreneur (e.g.: seeking and evaluating IT/IS opportunities); Resource Allocator (e.g.: budgeting and optimizing business processes); Architect of Change (e.g.: making strategic decisions); and Technological Strategist (where one of the main activities is to interact with the top management team in order to give them technological innovations’ scenarios and explaining how the innovations can improve the achievement of organizational goals).