Achieving and sustaining the relevance of IT leaders in the current turbulent economic context will need a radical new approach to the way we deliver value to our stakeholders.

A good first step would be to scrap the role of chief information officer (CIO) and create a genuinely useful role: the chief integration officer. After years of careful observation, I have reached the conclusion that the role of CIO is not only redundant but was never needed in the first place.

When the acronym CIO first emerged, many couldn’t see any need for the job at all because they thought the title was more suited to some sort of corporate librarian, rather than custodian of crucial commercial intelligence. And many joshed that CIO simply stood for “career is over”.

Nevertheless, the CIO role has persisted, although it remains poorly defined in too many instances. There is, however, still no consensus about whether a CIO is actually needed, let alone truly belongs at the top table. CIO reporting lines are equally dilatory and liberally distributed across the chief executive, finance director and chief operating officer portfolios.

Without a clear-cut definition, the role of CIO can be very confusing indeed, particularly when too readily combined with its common counterpart – a chief technology officer (CTO). This double act has been known to create double the confusion for all concerned. Nobody could ever accuse us of doing things by halves.

Some prefer to interpret the CIO role as chief infrastructure officer, with the incumbent happily embroiled in the bowels of technology, instead of managing the lifeblood of an effective enterprise. Others, meanwhile, see the CIO as quite a different beast: chief innovation officer. But that is an even more ephemeral concept than the chief information officer we know.

Sometimes I think there are probably as many interpretations of CIO as there are holders of the post. So I suppose one more will not hurt.

My proposal is for the CIO to be reinvented as chief integration officer – a job that can be universally defined and a key corporate function for the foreseeable future. No individual, group or organisation is a standalone venture. At every level, our world is constituted from constantly interacting dynamic systems and these living systems engage with each other, directly or indirectly. In a joined-up world, successful systems must effectively integrate with each other for mutual benefit.

And yet, when it comes to our formal business systems – also known as IT – we do not yet achieve seamless integration. For sure, lots of people talk passionately about extended value chains, partnership collaboration or electronic data interchange. But when push comes to shove, most organisations have big gaps in their information systems – internally and externally.

That’s where the chief integration officer comes in – a consistent, clearly defined role that will facilitate trans-enterprise integration, by providing natural mutual points of engagement and communication.

The key function of a chief integration officer is to ensure their organisation is coherent and congruent, internally and externally, by integrating effectively with other bodies: individual, corporate or statutory.

How is this different from the function of a chief information officer? It is significantly different, for many reasons.

First, the current parallel CTO job leads to great confusion of boundaries and responsibilities in many organisations. With the CTO reporting to the chief integration officer, any uncertainty of accountability for integration of people, process and technology would be removed.

Secondly, the role of the chief integration officer would be unequivocally recognised as a top-table function, rather than the uncertain position of a traditional CIO who is often kept at arm’s length by senior executives.

But this is not just about job titles – it is about delivering effective information systems, in a world populated by uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. Let’s get on with it.

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Colin Beveridge is an independent management consultant and author of the blog: Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire at www.colin-beveridge.com