The Business Intelligence Chronicles Part 6: The CIO giveth and the CIO taketh away

The role and success of BI in an organization depends to a large extent upon the attitude and interest of the CIO. I will characterize them as :

1. The Creators : Have a keen understanding and appreciation of the relevance of BI. Will lay great emphasis on creating strong technical underpinnings and a robust BI strategy. May not be as effective in selling BI to other groups as they are more the "Build a better mouse trap" kind of people. Other business heads like Chief Sales Officer or Chief Marketing Officer will find this kind of CIO to be very "technical" and "boring".

2. The Preservers/Enhancers : These are the showmen types. They have their ears to the ground and are attuned to what the other C-suite officers are talking about. These are the guys who will push their team to have dashboards delivered on the Blackberry or whatever the latest fad is. They do a great job in spreading awareness about BI capabilities in the organization. They are the "Build a mouse trap with the latest gizmos, and I'll find a buyer"

3.The Destroyers : BI bores them as does anything "technical". They are generally non-IT people placed in an IT leadership role because they had liberally spiked their conversation with the CEO with fancy buzzwords like Twitter, Social Networking, Facebook etc which the CEO construed to be IT (one will be surprised to know what passes off as IT in the C-suites of many corporations). They generally end up destroying BI capabilities by underfunding it and creating an environment where talented BI resources are forced to leave. These are the "Why build a mousetrap, when you can just Twitter" type.

Obviously these are generalizations. A typical CIO would be a mix of all the three attributes in different proportions.

What do you think your CIO is ? Can you think of any more kinds ?