Uncovering and testing archetypes of effective public sector CIOs

Abstract

Given the importance of public sector CIOs to government performance and citizens' faith in democracy as an efficient provider of services, it is important to understand what makes some government CIOs more effective than others. Q Method is used to uncover five archetypes of public sector CIOs which are shown to be reliable across two Q sorts. These archetypes include politically-oriented CIO, savvy negotiator, technology optimizer, and skillful communicator. Further analysis using a tournament scoring approach indicates that business-oriented CIOs are the most effective. Applying a stakeholder perspective to interpret the results, it is proposed that business-oriented CIOs understand the value in tracking closely to an organization's business leaders and strategically ignoring other stakeholders in their environment, even politically powerful ones. The development and comparison of archetypes provide a new focus of CIO research by extending from the individual level of the attribute to a combination of attributes (archetypes).