In the new century, China has begun to strive for the third strategic goal. The state has put forward the strategic measures of "promoting industrialization by informationization and promoting informationization by industrialization", and put forward the grand blueprint of China's national informationization. For such a great historical process, in order to cultivate tens of millions of management talents, IT talents and their comprehensive talents, there should and must be strong discipline support.
It can be expected that the establishment of the profession of "enterprise information manager" will greatly promote the development of information science, and then promote the cultivation, cohesion and use of talents, thus greatly promoting the process of national economy and social informatization.
Enterprises deal with information technology all the time in production, management and sales, so a position specializing in information development and application came into being, which is Chief Information Manager (CIO). The chief information manager is an important figure in modern enterprises. In American enterprises, it is equivalent to the deputy general manager and directly responsible to the top management decision-maker.
Compared with the mature CIO system in foreign countries, the CIO of most enterprises in China is still in the state of "latent CIO" or "quasi-CIO". At present, the CIO in China is only an information-related position, mostly at the department level, and is usually called the director of information center or the manager of IT department, which fails to penetrate into the strategic management and decision-making level of enterprises. They pay more attention to the planning and implementation of specific information technology.
Although enterprises in China have experienced informatization for nearly 20 years, the informatization effect of enterprises is not good, and the degree of informatization is still low. At present, only 4.7% of enterprises have realized the integrated management information system. The informatization level of most small and medium-sized enterprises even stays at the stage of typing with computers. But it is undeniable that there are indeed successful CIO cases like Lenovo, which are really rare. There are also many disputes about the responsibilities and functions of CIO in China business circles, and many scholars have different understandings and views on this. Some people think that in an enterprise, CIO is either the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) who is not responsible for the strategy or the CEO who leads the strategy implementation. Others think that CIO will become a CTO who is only responsible for information technology applications, or a consultant of consulting companies. Some people think that the dual responsibilities of CIO as a technical expert and strategist should be divided into two parts: CIO is responsible for promoting business and CTO is responsible for maintaining the normal operation of the system. In other words, CTO guarantees the current business and CIO is responsible for long-term planning. Some people think that with the gradual deepening of enterprise informatization in the future, the position of CIO can not be weakened, but as an important extension of CEO, its position will become more and more important.