There's only one thing wrong with this perspective. It's wrong. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Technical skills in IT management are important today like never before-and that fact is becoming increasingly evident. In the future, CIOs will need deep technical skills. A CIO with even average will be not only inadequate for his or her job, he or she will represent a danger to the overall health of the company.

Frankly, even on its surface, this argument of "CIO as business leader" doesn't make sense. Marketing, for example, is undergoing radical transformation as it shifts to online and digital. Today sophisticated analysis of click patterns, A/B testing, and so on are a core marketing competence. Do you think that CEOs want a head of marketing who doesn't know the details of how these kind of marketing tools operate? That marketing is run by someone who can use the language of business, even though he or she doesn't really understand the details of what is done in the marketing programs? Of course not.

IT, too, is becoming increasingly complex. Ten years ago, a company's website was primarily a display application designed to deliver static content. Today, a website is a transaction and collaboration application that supports far higher workloads. Websites commonly integrate external services that deliver content or data that is mixed with a company's own data to present a customized view to individual users. The application may expose APIs to allow other organizations to integrate it with applications, and those same APIs may be used to support a . Finally, the site probably experiences high variability of load throughout the year as seasonal events or .

depends on an exquisite tuning of a multitude of elements, any of which can affect response time and each of which must be monitored to assess an app's ongoing health. To be sure, one can expect the application to constantly change as new business arrangements, partnerships, or corporate events such as mergers or acquisitions require functionality changes.