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Cisco's Rebecca Jacoby -- Superstar CIO

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[forbesvid id="fvn/cio/cisco-bring-the-cio-to-the-table" showid="77"]

Quite literally, the chief information officer (CIO) at a company is a member of the “C-Suite” of corporate executive officers, along with the CEO, CFO, and so on.

But in reality, the depressing fact is that most CIOs are considered C-Suite backbenchers. They are treated like hired help. They and their IT departments are thought of as cost centers, not assets. They are not drivers of corporate strategy and growth.

This is reflected in very wide CIO pay ranges. The minority of CIOs able to make the C-Suite first team get paid big bucks – base pay in the $500,000 range, bonuses and stock options. CIOs are that considered glorified IT managers never get there.

Ron Ponder is thought to be the first million-dollar CIO while at AT&T in the early 1990s. Shortly after Mark Hurd replaced Carly Fiorina as HP’s chief, he hired Randy Mott as his CIO. Mott had built supply chains at Federal Express and Dell before coming to HP. Hurd, known as a cost cutter, did something unusual. He opened the bank vaults to get Mott. A CIO headhunter I know told me that Mott’s compensation package was in the range of $15 million over five years.

The best CIOs today are able to thread three needles. One is to keep the company’s IT infrastructure lean, efficient, security-hardened and fool-proof. The second is to build bridges to the future. Example: Any CIO today that is not up on trends like social media, cloud services, and managing the delicate balance of smartphone productivity and corporate security, is a CIO who won’t last long at their company.

The third needle is actually many needles. The effective CIO must be multilingual. He or she must be able to talk to the CEO, CFO and all line-of-business managers in business and financial language. Several CIO headhunters have told me that what stops most IT people from becoming CIOs, and most CIOs from becoming real C-Suite first-teamers, is their unwillingness or inability to learn all aspects of their company’s business, from finance to sales to marketing.

With this in mind, I thought you would enjoy an interview I recently did with Cisco’s CIO, Rebecca Jacoby. She is the rare C-Suite first timer, held in high regard by Cisco’s chief, John Chambers and CFO, Frank Calderoni.