This new annual list highlights top tech executives who are redefining the CIO role and driving game-changing innovation.s Covid-19 spread rapidly, they sprang into action, rolling out work-from-anywhere tech that enabled many millions of employees to do their jobs from their homes. They also launched new online and mobile channels to serve customers, prepping IT systems for the explosion of e-commerce activity that followed.
The foundations that made this historic and Herculean effort possible were already being laid by visionary tech leaders before the crisis began. The pandemic dramatically accelerated their digital transformation efforts, which harness everything from cloud computing to software-driven automation and artificial intelligence, compressing years’ worth of change into a matter of weeks or months.
The list is not a ranking. Instead, it seeks to highlight how the CIO role has evolved from its traditional focus on serving other corporate functions to one that emphasizes broad innovation and collaboration. Technology leaders are using data and machine intelligence to help identify new business opportunities and then co-creating products and services with their C-suite peers to take advantage of these.
Executives on the list come from a range of industries, though the worlds of technology and finance predominate. Those sectors have long been at the forefront of innovation and invest heavily in advanced technologies, but the mix will likely change over time as more and more companies realize code is now key to success. More than a third of the executives on the list are women and many are people of color.