Thanks for your thought-provoking article!  As someone who has held both the CTO and CIO title multiple times, I’m also interested in how these titles are used. More to the point, I want to understand how the CEO and Board sees the differences.  In my experience the CTO has always been seen as the ‘keeper of the infrastructure, the defender of the architecture’…the head geek, in other words. And the CIO has been seen as the political, business-engaged change agent and overseer of the budget.  I’ve heard the two roles described as analogous to CEO/COO, or “Mr/Ms Outside vs. Mr/Ms Inside.”  Since I have a technical and a business background I’ve been comfortable wearing both hats, no matter the title; but it’s important to me that my boss or my client and I share an understanding of what the titles mean.  Just yesterday I was with the CEO & CFO of a client, and their usage of the two terms–unprompted by me–matched my understanding of their definition.  Tom, it seems you’re reversing the two definitions. I have no problem with “Technology” being above “Information” in the hierarchy (although I’ve always been taught we use invest in Technology to provide Information, which makes ‘Information’ the business value-add): I just want to be sure we all agree what the terms mean.  Your larger point–which seems to be that IT executives can outsource commodity ‘data processing’ and focus their time and attention on data and on deriving insights from that data–is an interesting one. Over the 30 years I’ve been in IT, we’ve sought ways to hand work off to specialists who could do things ‘faster, better, cheaper’ due to their economies of scale and their focus.  Maybe we have reached the point where ‘dial tone’ (voice, data, servers, databases, etc.) is the purview of facilities, just like they provision electric power to our desks. If I had the luxury of creating an IT infrastructure from scratch, maybe I could stick everything in the cloud and give up my oversight of the actual technology. But in my experience the ability to make choices–to mix and match disparate technologies (on premise/cloud, mainframe/web/mobile, etc.)–has allowed my teams to deliver great business solutions  I’m left wondering whether you described someone who was in the position to try something new, or offering this as a ‘best practice’ that we should seek to emulate?
The CIO title has come to represent internal transaction systems and IT and network infrastructure management, writes Guest Columnist Thomas H. Davenport.  The title of CTO not only sounds cooler, he writes, but suggests a focus on technology used to understand and deliver products and services.