Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, a body of research in the field of management centered on the roles of the top level managers in international, globaland transnational companies. During the 1980s and 1990s, top information systems managers in domestic companies were studied at some depth in attempts to determine how their roles were defined and what influences have contributed to their continuing evolution. Grover, et al. (1993), studied the roles of the chief information officer (CIO) based on the categorizations of Mintzberg (1970) concerning the ten job roles of managers. McFarlan (1992) and Kanter and Kesner (1992) also conceptualized the role of the CIO in the particular context of the multinational information systems environment. Jarvenpaa and Ives (1994) expressed the importance of investigating the roles of the CIO this way: The senior information systems managers can begin to truly impact theform, structure, and culture of their organizations by focusing on activities where they are positioned to add value: ...spiritual leader or at least co-conspirator in cultivating the new values, attitudes, and behaviors of information use and sharing, ...providing integrative tools, such as organizational memory, ...active involvement in reengineering the network into its new network form, ...designer of the information architecture and the accompanying corporate highway systems...and social engineering that must accompany them.... The purpose of this study is to examine the roles of CIOs of large international companies which have a focus on use of information technology (IT). Differences and similarities between the roles of these CIOs and those of CIOsstudied in previous works are identified.

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