Tom Lasswell

technology executive leadership

Notes From the CIDO Program · Part 1 of 1

Business

Why a CIDO Program, Now: Notes From an ITSM Leader Going Back to Class

By · · 8 min read

I'm the Director of IT for DC BLOX. I started managing people at 25, so that was my first managerial role. I've been in the tech space for a long time, and most of it has been spent on the side of the house that keeps things running: service desks, infrastructure, change control, the pager that goes off at 2am. On September 23 and 24, 2026, I sat through orientation for Carnegie Mellon University's Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO) Certificate Program at Heinz College Executive Education, and spent two afternoons being told, politely, that the job now demands more than what I'm already good at.

This is the first post in a new series, written from inside the jump from ITSM leader to digital and business strategist, module by module, over the next four months. Part of the point of putting this in public is accountability: if I say I'm going to change something, you get to check whether I did.

Why the name on the door changed

Heinz College's certificate used to run under the CIO name and was renamed to CIDO, and the rename reflects a real change in what the role does. The program's own materials put it plainly: "The CIO era was about enabling. The CIDO era is about transforming." (Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College, "From Enablers to Transformers: The Shift from CIO to CIDO.")

That distinction matters to someone with my background, because "enabling" is the job I already know how to do well. Keep the lights on, keep the tickets moving, keep the infrastructure available, and translate whatever the business wants into something that ships. Two outside data points from this year back up why that's no longer the whole brief. Deloitte's 2026 Global Technology Leadership Study, which surveyed more than 660 senior technology executives between December 2025 and February 2026, found 79% of tech leaders now prioritize driving business outcomes over pure operational focus, a shift the study frames as "operators to orchestrators." And research summarized by MIT Sloan Management Review points to CIO.com's 2023 State of the CIO survey, where 71% of respondents expected CIOs to be actively driving business innovation and strategy within three years. Both of those numbers were already trending before I signed up. Orientation just made the trend personal.

What orientation said the program is for

The program director opened with the aim in one sentence: build enterprise leaders who turn technology, data and AI into sustained business value, and who can hold their own influencing the C-suite and the board. It's practitioner-led. The faculty and coaches are sitting or former CIOs, and the pitch for that design is "learn it Wednesday, use it Thursday": whatever a module teaches on a Wednesday evening, you're expected to put to use the following day at work.

Carnegie Mellon's public page for the program confirms the shape of the four months I'm now in: orientation September 23-24, 2026 (the sessions I just described), twelve live virtual modules running Wednesdays from 4 to 9pm Eastern between October and January, and then a thirteenth: the final module and practicum, in person on CMU's Pittsburgh campus, February 9-11, 2027 (a virtual option exists for people who can't travel). Faculty named on that page include Dana Deasy, Boeing's CIDO, and Ari Lightman, a Heinz Distinguished Professor. Steve Agnoli, the retired CIO of Reed Smith LLP, teaches the module on developing an IT and digital transformation strategy.

How the next four months are structured

Every deliverable in this program is team-based, and the format is a simulation: each team plays the role of the incoming CIDO of a real public company. The team picks the company; the program assigns the industry. Over the four months, that fictional mandate produces four real deliverables: company research and a stakeholder analysis in October, a capabilities and digital-maturity assessment briefed to a mock executive committee in December, a draft strategy with a rough budget and governance model in January, and a final report with a 50 to 55 minute presentation to a mock executive committee of coaches in February. The whole arc is meant to mirror a new CIDO's first 180 days in a role, compressed into a semester. AI tools may help generate ideas along the way, and the deliverable itself has to be the team's own work.

Each team gets a coach: roughly 11 coaches across 46 students, and every coach is a current or former CIO. The cadence is at least a monthly call, though coaches suggest checking in every other week, and deliverables go to the coach a few days before they're due so there's time to react to feedback. One line from orientation stuck with me as a description of the coaching model: coaches give you "guide rails while you drive the car." They're there to keep you from driving the exercise off a cliff while you figure out how to do it yourself. Coaches also sit on the final mock executive committee in February, so the person giving you feedback in November is the same person grading the performance in front of an audience three months later.

Who's in the room

Forty-six students split across at least eleven teams, mostly from the US and Canada, with classmates from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Peru, Germany and Switzerland. Financial services is the single largest industry represented; manufacturing, utilities, energy, mining, telecom, healthcare, higher education, construction, nonprofits, public sector, defense tech, sports and tech vendors round out the rest. Seniority runs from IT managers and directors up through SVPs, sitting CIOs and CTOs, a CISO and a chief AI officer, and a fair number of people, like me, who came into technology by way of operations, finance or engineering. I won't be naming any of them here, and I won't be naming their employers either. What people say and do in a graded team exercise stays theirs.

One small detail from the round of introductions is worth repeating because it says something about where this cohort's head is at: when the program director asked everyone to name their favorite tech resource, Claude came up more than anything else, enough that the director remarked on it out loud. I said the same thing about myself in my own introduction: I use Claude to do my initial research, and then I go out and find other stuff to confirm it. That habit is basically how I built the References section at the bottom of this post.

Two things I said at orientation that I want to hold myself to

During introductions, we were asked to talk about how we see the archetypes a technology leader can play. Here's how I described it, more or less verbatim:

"I think there's stages of where organizations are in their growth. Our company changed from a startup… we went from 50 to 150 employees in the matter of 2 years. When you're in a startup, we want the business co-creator driving how we create revenue. Now that we're in this hyper-growth state, now we've got to be an orchestrator and start to take on new policies. The technology is the part that got us to be a CIDO, but not the future of what the business is relying on us for. We adjust the archetype based on the organization and the strategic goals."

I stand by that. It also happens to echo the exact word Deloitte's study used for the destination: orchestrator. I didn't get that word from the study; I said it in a room before I'd read the study. That's a little reassuring and a little uncomfortable at the same time. Reassuring, because it means the instinct I've built running an ITSM organization is pointed in the right direction. Uncomfortable, because "we adjust the archetype based on the organization" is easy to say in an introduction and much harder to actually do when the organization changes underneath you and nobody sends a memo announcing it.

The second thing I said was about what IT is actually for:

"IT for the most part has visibility into every organization. We're kind of the glue. Looking at the amount of applications a team has to log into to do their jobs, that business driven line activity is really to go and look at simplicity. How do we give you one place to log into? IT's function is to make efficiencies and really drive the business towards the value."

That's the ITSM leader in me talking, and I think it's true as far as it goes. But sitting through orientation made me notice what I left out when I said it: I described IT noticing where the business is inefficient, and left out IT setting the direction the business should move in before being asked. That's the gap this program exists to close, and it's the gap I plan to test myself against over the next four months.

What I told the program director

Before we left orientation, the program director asked everyone to follow up by email with what we hope to get out of the program and why now. Here's what I sent him, more or less verbatim:

I'm Director of IT at DC BLOX, and I just finished my EMBA in 2025. I bring 20+ years in IT, mostly in managed services, including building a managed services practice from zero and leading a 60-person team. DC BLOX has grown from 50 to 150 employees in two years, so I'm living the shift from operator to orchestrator we talked about at orientation.

What I want out of CIDO: sharpen my executive presence, get better at driving change and building collaboration at the executive level, and make the move out of middle management into owning technology strategy. I also want to build lasting connections with this cohort and keep learning.

A short list and one clock: four months of Wednesday evenings and a practicum in Pittsburgh to show progress on every item.

Final thought

I've spent my career on the half of the technology organization that gets judged by whether things stay up. That's real work, and I'm keeping it. The line I said in class, that technology is what got us to the CIDO seat and something bigger is what the business now relies on us for, came out of my mouth before I fully believed it, and four months of Wednesday evenings and a February practicum in Pittsburgh are supposed to be what closes that gap between saying it and believing it.

The CIO era was about enabling. The CIDO era is about transforming.

I'll grade myself against that line in the finale of this series. Next up: the first graded module, and whatever it forces me to admit about how my own organization actually runs.

References

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