One of the most useful, and at one time most common, senior titles in business was and is General Manager. Usage varied, but generally speaking this was the most senior rank not actually on the Board of Directors. The law recognises the specific responsibilities of the Chairman/Chairperson, the Managing Director and the Company Secretary and the duties of any Director. That is legally where corporate governance begins and also where it ends up when anything hits the fan. But General Manager is an organisational rank, with the specific responsibilities determined by the employer. General Manager now seems a tad old-fashioned to some, perhaps, but it certainly still has value and in many respects a clearer meaning than many fancier job titles.
We have long since abandoned the convention that a Director is a Board member and company director, with the obvious example being the IT Director who is probably not while the Finance Director probably is. State and voluntary organisations use Director generously these days, perhaps to add status and authority to what would once have been a simple Divisional Manager job. Would it be politically naughty, for example, to query how many HSE posts have ‘director’ in the title? But of course we all understand that Director General is even more elevated. Once upon a time that was a title reserved for chief executives of non-profit organisations. Today? Well, it probably also refers to a divisional manager — but in a much larger organisation.
“In at least two large Irish-based service enterprises the roles of COO and CIO are combined in one person because the skills and background experience are seen as largely overlapping”
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The ‘C-suite’ suffers from similar ambiguity. Are the Chief Something Officers always directors and board members, any more than US corporate Vice Presidents? Quite frequently the C-suite is in truth an executive management committee, reporting to the Board through the CEO. Its members have lots of practical decision making power, and control of substantial budgets, but they are not actually at the top level of policy and strategy decisions, strictly speaking. That is always the legal Board of Directors.
General manager
Back to the General Manager. That title has been subsumed into the C-suite as Chief Operating Officer, although so has what might have been the Production Director in a manufacturing business or the Operations Director in a service enterprise. We are still talking about a rank a step below the CEO, not necessarily on the main board and probably with a specialist or technical career background before reaching that exalted height. Sounds very like a CIO, doesn’t it? In at least two large Irish-based service enterprises (one a leader in outsourced financial sector services) the roles of COO and CIO are combined in one person because the skills and background experience are seen as largely overlapping.
If the enterprise provides financial sector services that are almost 100% based on ICT, it might well be asked if the difference between the COO and the CIO responsibilities could be anything but marginal. On the other hand, applying some not always common sense, if the enterprise is a pharmachemical process plant or a mining or an oil/gas exploration outfit — all heavily ICT-dependent today — you would expect the COO to come from the more appropriate strand of engineering. In fact if we were talking about the army, you would probably expect a military background combined with the engineering qualifications. Which leads fairly inexorably to the idea that the General Manager or COO should be — or usually will be — a leader with domain knowledge. The role is executive, not strategic. Executive officer, first officer, first mate, Number Two.
CITO
Actually, a very interesting question is why the CIO was not called the CITO from the beginning? Was the idea of omitting ‘technology’ so that the role and/or title would be a little more general? Was it to remove the C-suite taint of ‘jumped up Johnny Electrics’, like a military promotion from the ranks to the officers’ mess? Was it an aspirational attempt to put Information at the centre? Or was it simply that the other C-suite titles are TLAs?*
The real story is lost in the mists of the 1980s, when ICT was still data processing. Back in those frontier days, a manager was a real manager and the top honcho was managing director. Even in large and complex organisations, the average ratio of ‘managers’ to enlisted employees was more like 1:20-plus, reflecting military tradition, with the junior officers leading a platoon of 30 men.
The ancient Roman army, from which most Western military conventions have come down to us, liked to organise decimally. Culturally, since then all armies have been experts in the tidy bureaucracy from which civil servants later learned. So 100 men was the command of a centurion and regarded as about the largest unit one man could personally direct and control. Most organisational experts to this day reckon the maximum span of one manager’s control should be in the 100-150 region.
On the possibly tenuous assumption that most smaller organisations will not have adopted C-suite nomenclature, it seems clear that any CIO (CITO) is going to have upwardly delegated responsibilities as well as the one that come from the board down. It is a truly vertical function, as distinct from the CEO and to a very high degree the CFO and CMO who have horizontal spans of leadership.
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