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Yes. A business executive can become a CIO, and business experience can help in a role increasingly tied to strategy, innovation, and company-wide change. But it is not a substitute for understanding technology: the best fit depends partly on the organization’s architecture and how much legacy IT it must manage.
Why business leaders are targeting the CIO role
The CIO job has expanded beyond keeping systems reliable and efficient. In a Jan. 24, 2022 feature, CIO described the role as more focused on changing the business and finding new opportunities through technology. Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search Associates, put the shift this way: “The CIO role used to be defined as an operational position that would focus on efficiency and keeping the business running faster, cheaper, better, and safer,” she says. “Now, technology leadership isn’t about running the business; it’s about changing the business and finding new opportunity.”
That makes business-side experience attractive. Leaders who have worked with customers, operations, finance, or profit-and-loss responsibilities may be better prepared to judge whether a technology investment supports growth, improves service, or changes how the company competes. They may also be comfortable explaining trade-offs to executives and the board.
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Does a CIO need a technical background?
A CIO does not necessarily need to have followed a conventional IT career path, but business fluency alone is not enough. The 2022 feature reported a Gartner finding that the share of CIOs from non-IT backgrounds more than tripled between 2015 and 2018. It also said a little over a quarter of IT leaders entered the job without the customary years of hands-on IT experience. CIO did not identify the original Gartner report in the feature, so those figures should be understood as the article’s account of Gartner research.
Heller’s qualification is central: a business-oriented CIO is more plausible when the company has modern architecture and is committed to digital-enabled business. A company with a large legacy IT estate needs leadership that understands enterprise IT, its dependencies, and the risks of changing it. As Heller said: “These candidates, especially those with P&L experience, may be more strategic and better able to speak finance, the language of the boardroom,” she says, “but that’s all predicated on a company having an agile, modern architecture. If you’ve got a massive investment in legacy IT, you can’t have a CIO that doesn’t have an enterprise IT background.”
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How business experience can strengthen technology leadership
The value of a business background is not that it makes technology less important. It can help a CIO connect technical decisions to the needs and constraints of the business.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches- Customer understanding: Prior customer-facing work can help a leader evaluate whether a digital service solves a real customer problem.
- Financial judgment: P&L and finance experience can sharpen investment cases and make costs, risks, and expected outcomes clearer.
- Operational context: Experience outside IT can reveal how technology affects day-to-day work across the organization.
- Executive communication: Familiarity with business priorities can help translate technical options into decisions a CEO or board can assess.
Richard Wiedenbeck, Ameritas SVP and chief technology and transformation officer, described the connection between business perspective and technology outcomes: “Technology has to care as much about business outcomes as the business does, and [my background] gave me that lens and ability to speak their language,” he says.
Vince Kellen, CIO of the University of California, San Diego, expressed the balance more directly: “You have to get away from the core of technology into the core of business without leaving the core of technology behind,” Kellen advises.
Two routes to CIO—and what each must demonstrate
There is no single career path in the feature, and the following comparison is a practical way to think about the routes it describes, not a validated hiring rubric.
| Career route | Likely strength | What the candidate still needs to show |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional IT progression | Experience with enterprise systems, technology delivery, and the operational realities of IT. | Ability to understand business priorities, make an investment case, and connect technology choices to outcomes. |
| Business leadership with technology fluency | Customer, finance, operations, or P&L experience and familiarity with business decision-making. | Enough grounding in enterprise IT and architecture to lead technology delivery, especially where legacy systems are significant. |
Either path is stronger when the candidate can point to outcomes—such as customer value, transformation, growth, or efficiency—rather than treating technology adoption as an end in itself.
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The 2022 feature’s development advice is dual-track: deepen business understanding while continuing to build technical fluency.
- Learn how the business creates value. An MBA may help, but hands-on rotations and projects can also build understanding of customers, operations, finance, and how performance is measured.
- Seek work tied to outcomes. Take responsibility for projects where you can show how technology affected a business result, not only whether a system was delivered.
- Build fluency in modern architecture and delivery. The feature points to cloud, microservices, APIs, and agile development as areas technology leaders should understand.
- Practice explaining trade-offs. Be ready to describe why a technology choice matters in terms of business outcomes, along with its costs, risks, and operational effects.
What the CIO role looks like in newer reporting
A later Foundry feature dated Nov. 20, 2025, describes the CIO as balancing business strategy with technology implementation, including AI adoption, collaboration across the business, transformation, cybersecurity, and ongoing operational responsibilities. Its figures belong to the 2025 State of the CIO, a separate survey edition: Foundry reports that it surveyed 906 IT leaders and 250 line-of-business professionals. In that reporting, 41% of IT leader respondents described their role as strategic, up from 35% in 2024, and 52% expected to sustain a strategic orientation over the next three to five years. The article also reports that 82% of IT respondents and 76% of line-of-business participants described the CIO charter as digital and innovation focused; 82% said CIOs were leading digital transformation initiatives; and 76% said balancing business innovation and operational excellence remained an ongoing challenge.
Those 2025 figures are context, not a direct comparison with the 2022 findings: the survey editions may differ in wording, samples, and methods. The later reporting reinforces the dual nature of the job—business leadership and technology responsibility—rather than suggesting one can replace the other.
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