The Looming CIO Shortage - ' Assuring the Supply of ' (
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Assuring the Supply of Future CIOs
What are best practices for developing CIO candidates? How should firms prepare CIOs-in-grooming so that the CIO transition will be orderly, with a minimum of disruption in important initiatives?
We see two versions of this challenge, depending on the firm's human capital management strategy: Some CIOs are in firms that are proactively engaged in talent management. That is, they believe they are engaged in what McKinsey and Company call a "war for talent." These are companies whose competitive advantage lies in the heads and hearts of its people.
On the other hand, there are firms where competitive advantage lies in market power, unique processes or regulatory power, not so much in people.
In this report, we characterize companies whose human resource policies suggest they are engaged in a war for talent as having enriched HR environments. In these firms, the job of developing CIO candidates is shared across the top management team and is part and parcel of the effort to develop all senior executives (e.g., their CxOs). While we believe that most of the final grooming of a CIO candidate is the responsibility of the CIO, in enriched firms the foundation for this grooming is more systematically established.
We characterize firms whose HR policies suggest that are not engaged in a war for talent as having self-serve HR environments. In self-serve environments, CIOs have more responsibility for human capital development, and they may need to drive more of the process.
We do not mean to suggest that either environment is better than the other, only that they are different. In both environments, the last mile of CIO grooming is not the responsibility of HR or the top management team or anyone else; it's the responsibility of the sitting CIO.
Leadership 
