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Note: Vanguard is bringing a true techie back in to lead IT, but his job will be about a lot more than technology.
Two intriguing ideas I heard in the past week:
One, a CIO should focus on running the company first, and on running IT second.
Two, swapping CIOs--or executives in any position--can be a virtue in itself, because the change brings in new ideas and thinking.
Those are my characterizations, and they're surely oversimplications. But they're ideas that I took away from talking with two executives, Paul Heller and John Marcante, about a recent executive shuffle at Vanguard, the mutual fund company.
In the reorg, Marcante is the new chief information officer, and Heller moves from CIO to head of the retail investor group. Tim Buckley, who led IT before Heller and has most recently run retail, moves into the chief investment officer position.
Vanguard, more than any other company I've dealt with, is comfortable shifting people regularly into new roles. (Vanguard was the No. 1 InformationWeek 500 company in 2010.) Here's some more thinking on these two ideas, which some IT pros aren't going to like the sound of.
1. The CIO's No. 1 job is to help run the company.
Marcante, the new head of IT, gets a big promotion here because he's now part of the senior...