Make the case: Why should CIOs become advisors?

Personally speaking CIO's should be advisors due to the broad scope of their experiences. Rarely do you come across roles that interact that much with various stakeholders: board, customers, engineering, operations, sales. etc. All while operating and giving guidance to fairly significant operations as well. Ability to stay calm under pressure is something that all CIO's get sooner or later (after one too many operational issues), so if you can calmly digest the situation at end, reflect back on your experiences you can provide excellent advise to others to avoid either pitfalls that you had yourself or have heard about or think could happen. CIO's are fairly unique role and ability to advise is one of their greatest strengths (if underrated) so having an experienced CIO as your advisor is a great fit for any organization.

CIOs should become advisors for a number of reasons (assumption: you aren't saying they should forsake being a CIO, but rather that they should also be advisors): 

I'm asked to speak on industry topics an average of once a week? While the simple assumption by me is that I will share information and at the same time widen the audience for my company (by accident), I always learn something as I research my topic. 

Yes, I often do know the topic pretty well already, but I like to be sure I'm not making too many assumptions. 

Being an advisor gives you a direct opportunity to see what others are doing with their business and their technology investments. If you're doing the role of advisor correctly, you're likely to learn as much from each advising opportunity as the people being advised, learn from you.

responsibility

Advisory is an interesting space. For top CIOs that worked on critical transformations, it’s therapeutic to take an advisory role and a solid way to have greater impact for more people. Many of us spend the most time as CIOs talking to other c-suite leaders, so it’s natural transition.

On the flip side, depending on the advisory role it can feel like helping people with the same set of problems repeatedly. Climbing deep on new challenges feeds our own creativity - and advisory can limit this.

I perform trusted advisory now. The impact I get to have is exciting. But there is always a part of me thinking about other roles to go deeper on individual opportunities. That might make me all that better of an advisor?

Good CIOs should be able to bridge business and technical acumen together in a way that should make sense to anyone, which makes them appropriate advisors.