Chris Curran (@cbcurran) posted an interesting take on whether a CIO can be truly successful without IT domain experience.  One of the more enlightening parts of the post is the diagram that captures 5 "functions" from Business Experience Only and With IT Experience.  I can see a very natural transition of this table into our model with "functions" as "capabilities" and experience labels as two of our four minimum perspectives (Business and Technology).  In fact, that is how one might start building the Office of the CIO with a Capability-Based Approach.  

Back to my reply:  it's an interesting premise, and one that is repeated many times in most environments I see. Larger companies tend to move 'high-potential' executive candidates to a less technical and more management "science" tracks. While I agree with Chris's premise that the optimal CIO should have both IT and relevant business experience, I have seen CIOs without IT experience succeed as well. One of the best was a CISO I worked for who actually studied, took, and passed a CISSP exam along with her technical resources - after working her way up through the general management track.

I found the example of the recreationally whining CIO quite instructive. The underlying issue wasn't lack of IT expertise - it was lack of trust in her "new people". Effective leadership is not about leading - it's about getting others to follow you, and that generally involves bidirectional understanding, if not trust. There are plenty of successful leadership patterns documented - even going as far back as Sun Tsu's Art of War. I'm not aware of any successful leadership patterns that involve calling one's team "them". Did the CISO in my example need to take the CISSP exam? Of course not, but it did gain her credibility with her new department despite lack of any security-related work in her experience.

As IT becomes increasingly complex at all levels of infrastructure and application development, CIO's ability to be successful will probably become more dependent on whether they can rely on people they lead for decision-grade information. It doesn't have to be direct reports - but there better be trusted advisers they can rely on. Without that in place, any organization that appoints a non-technically savvy CIO is in severe danger of mismanaging their technology investments.