CIOs have the skills to be COOs, claims News UK's Chris Taylor

Taylor believes that many of the management skills necessary to be a COO will have been acquired by CIOs at some point in their careers

CIOs learn many of the skills that are required to be a COO on their way to leading the technology division, according to News UK's COO, Chris Taylor.

Taylor, who was made CIO of News UK in September 2012, and subsequently made COO in June 2013, explained that he was asked to become COO of the company when Mike Darcey took over as CEO.

"So I still run the technology organisation and also run what was a completely separate department dedicated to operations. The rationale was that [Darcey] felt that there was a lot of commonality between some of the practices, skills and techniques of running a tech operation and running a manufacturing and production operation, and wanted the two departments to work increasingly closer together," he told Computing.

He said other reasons for being given the role was because the operations department has some of the most sophisticated technology within the company, and because the company has a publishing services division where it prints, distributes and provides other services to other publishers in the country.

"The contention was that if we're printing other people's products, we could offer a full set of services, including technology services, so bringing those two [departments] together opened the door to that ," Taylor explained.

"If you've got two parts of the organisation working together, what better way of [making that happen], by putting them under a single leader," he suggested.

Taylor believes that this same model - of having a COO that looks over the technology department – does exist elsewhere, particularly in the media industry. He suggested that it could also happen in other industries because CIOs have built up skills throughout their careers that can be used in a COO role.

"If you are made a CIO, which ever path you take to get there, along the way you have acquired a number of skills; crisis management, project management, management resources - these are all general management skills that can be applied to a number of different executive-level disciplines," he said.

"[These skills] can act as a real springboard for people who want to move beyond being the person who just runs the technology function, whether that's in operations or in other parts of the business," he added.

Indeed, Taylor thinks that the CIO role "gets you into the board-level conversations", but the general skills that a lot of CIOs have developed during their careers give them the opportunity to gain responsibility for other functions.

"It doesn't have to be the COO - it's one of the closest [to the CIO role], but there are various others," he said.