GW: With a finance and business background, I am familiar with managing budgets and spreadsheets. It also allows me to better understand the challenges of the CFO and CEO in meeting shareholders' and investors' needs. But regardless of the background, the person definitely needs good people skills to take up this position.

One of the most important aspects as a CIO is to build a personal rapport within the organization. Many CIOs have struggled to get things done and approved. With a good rapport, it is so much easier to get things done.

There is a trend of more business people taking up the CIO role. I've read research that shows 50 to 55 percent of CIOs come from a tech background and move into business, with only 25 percent having a pure IT background. A techie person needs to make that change or else they won't be able to move up the ladder.

A Gartner report also shows the CIO's role should focus more on core competence: to understand the business, spend more time and effort on security analysis and vendor management.

Since offerings from the vendors are becoming like a commodity, vendor management becomes an essential part of the CIO's job. Just like at RSA, we have no more programmers and all our programming work is outsourced.