When W. Roy Dunbar was appointed chief information officer at Mastercard in September 2004, his chief executive officer Robert Selander specifically drew attention to his experience in “sales, marketing, product development and general management”.
In this, Mr Dunbar is representative of the shift in the role of CIO from a heavy focus on pure technology to that of communicator. As befitting someone of his cross-business skill set, he stresses the need to talk with the enterprise as a whole: “It is critical that a CIO has a good feeling for technology but I certainly see myself as an interlocutor at times. It is invaluable for a CIO to be able to communicate with the sub-cultures that you can find within different areas of an enterprise.”
