CIO-Plus is a movement which is coined by Peter High, a columnist for Forbes and author of the book World Class IT, which signifies the growing trend that chief information officers, usually the heads of the IT function of companies, are increasingly taking on titles in addition to "chief information officer", such as "chief innovation officer", "chief improvement officer", "head of business transformation" and "Senior Vice President – Technology, Logistics and Customer Service".
The first mention of the term was in an article dated on November 14, 2012, titled "The Emergence of the CIO-Plus". In Peter High's column in Forbes, called Technovation, he has written articles on a significant number of examples of this documented business trend, including:
Puneet Bhasin, the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Technology, Logistics and Customer Service for Waste Management
Chris Laping, the Senior Vice President of Business Transformation and Chief Information Officer for Red Robin Gourmet Burgers
Randy Spratt, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer for McKesson
Chris Scalet, the former Executive Vice President of Global Process & Services and CIO of Merck
Sheleen Quish, the Senior Vice President IT and HR at Ameristar Casinos
David Johns, the Chief Information Officer and SVP of Global Information Services for Owens Corning, and who used to be Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain and Information Technology Officer of that company
Ben Allen, the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Innovation Officer of Marsh & McLennan
Mike Capone, the Chief Information Officer and the Corporate VP of Product Development of ADP
Praveen Chopra, the Chief Information Officer and Chief Supply Chain Officer of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
Bill Schlough, the Chief Information Officer of the San Francisco Giants and San Jose Giants Chairman
Tim Theriault, the Chief Information, Innovation, and Improvement Officer of Walgreens
Karl Salnoske, the Chief Information Officer and EVP of Service Delivery of GXS
Filippo Passerini, the Chief Information Officer and Group President of Global Business Services of Procter & Gamble
Vinnie Mirchandani in his DealArchitect.com article, notes additional examples of the CIO/CTO+:
Rob Carter, who is also Co-CEO at Fedex Corporate Services
Glenn Renwick, who is now CEO of Progressive Insurance
Charlene Begley, who also headed GE's appliance/lighting business till her recent medical leave
Vijay Ravindran, Chief Digital Officer at The Washington Post Co.
Phiroz Darukhanavala, who has called his CTO group, Digital Business at BP for over a decade
Steve Miranda, who heads Fusion apps for Oracle, also has many internal CIO duties
Sukumar Rajgopal, who is also Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant
This business movement has been documented by notable trade publications such as MindSpa, Accelerating IT Success a blog called Deal Architect, the University of New Hampshire, as well as on Twitter. In his blog, Vinnie Mirchandani points out that Chris Murphy, an editor of Information Week, has also covered this trend of the chief information officer role evolving into the "chief digital officer", another example of the CIO-plus, in which chief technology executives have to be concerned with, and avidly address, the needs of external customer of a business through the use of technology. The website Business 2 Community has also reflected on the trend of the CIO-plus, noting the synergies of leading IT and other functions, as has CIO.com's Enterprise CIO Forum.
The original article, and growing body of work and use of the term suggests four reasons for the movement known as "CIO-Plus":
CIOs are structured problem solvers that can tackle problems beyond Information Technology
CIOs with additional responsibility offer efficiencies in managerial decision making to cut costs out of the organization
CIOs that can communicate have a great balance to be strong leaders across various businesses
So many revenue and cost improvements are delivered through technology, which is a foundational leadership opportunity for CIOs
