Universities target aspiring CIOs

Tuson: "Our course will be like a Harvard MBA for CIOs"

Academic and professional qualifications aimed at CIOs are few. Some universities, including University College London, Exeter, Oxford Brookes, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield and Lancaster offer information technology management for business (ITMB) degrees to undergraduates or people just embarking on an IT management career.

“There is the realisation that the IT industry is moving much more towards business services. They [ITMB courses] are not relevant to a CIO, but they do help populate the IT industry with more business-aware IT graduates,” says Andrew Tuson, head of the Department of Computing at City University London.

“There are very good courses if you want to be an entry-level programmer, and masters degrees or business-level analyst courses at the mid-career phase, but beyond that, not much.”

Existing or aspiring CIOs tend to be people who have already spent a lot of time in the IT industry, often in middle management and consultant-type roles, and who are now looking to advance their careers.

Many choose to take post-graduate degrees in masters of business administration (MBA), widely recognised as an important step towards successful business management.

“The difficulty here is that from the CIO perspective, the MBA is too focused on generalist management skills, or intended as preparation for a consultancy role, and does not cover the topics that CIOs need to master,” says Tuson.

“At City, some MBAs have IT and systems options, but these courses still cover a lot of subject matter that CIOs do not need to know, and a lot of what they do need to know is not covered in enough detail.”

Some specialised courses that are geared more towards the needs of aspiring CIOs are emerging, however. Cranfield University is currently waiting senate approval of a new course, an MSc in management and technology, aimed at technologists who wish to boost their technical knowledge while simultaneously developing their management skills, helping them to progress to senior positions. The course will run for two to three years part time to accommodate students already in full-time employment.

City University London is preparing a similar course intended solely for CIOs, according to Tuson, and scheduled to begin in 2010. The two-year, part-time course will span multiple disciplines, including informatics, law, business and social sciences.

“The intention is to make this the equivalent for aspiring CIOs to what the Harvard MBA was during the 1970s,” says Tuson. “We are engaging some CIOs in the design of the course, and inviting them to deliver lectures as part of it.”

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