I’ve met a lot of ambitious IT professionals who aspire to the CIO role. Some aim high early, climbing to a senior position at a major institution. Others, like me, take a different road: starting small, owning more, and learning fast.My first CIO role came while serving a small branch campus. It was modest, but it was mine. What mattered most was that I worked for leaders who believed in investing in potential. They sent me to the Gartner CIO Academy, where I first met Ellen Kitzis, a fellow sociologist and a thinker who saw technology leadership not just as systems and strategy, but as a human endeavor.Her book, The New CIO Leader, laid out a vision for a new kind of IT leadership in the wake of the dot-com collapse. It became my field guide. In today’s Dispatch, we want to revisit its central premise: CIO trust and credibility is everything. And that credibility lives or dies not based on our technical prowess, but in how we negotiate the daily gap between expectations and resources.

Episodes

Building CIO Credibility: Lessons from the Ground Up