What Does a Chief Information Officer do?

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) leads the IT of a company: its systems, its data, the IT budget and the IT team. The CIO belongs to the management and decides which systems the company builds, buys and runs.

In 2023 and 2024, I was Chief Information Officer at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital until I left the company.

As an expert in creating digital products, I love working together with people. When I joined Blocksize Capital at the beginning of 2022 as Head of Decentralized Finance and Head of Node Operations, it was clear that the role would bring a number of challenges. During my time there, I successfully built and grew the DeFi and node operations team. Our team’s biggest achievements during that time were professionally growing the Chainlink infrastructure on two continents, implementing cost-cutting measures, and successfully launching a new digital assets market data product.

During my time at Blocksize Capital, I was in contact with a large number of market players, especially from the TradFi space, as well as blockchain companies. It turned out that there were still many business opportunities to be seized, and our company had the manpower and skills necessary to provide such solutions. The challenges were not just technical. Strategic goal setting, product marketing, and the operational work needed to take the necessary steps were especially critical for success.

Know-why and know-how

In the past, I designed and implemented a wide range of IT projects. Thanks to my leadership experience, technical knowledge, and track record at Blocksize Capital, I was appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the company, effective January 1, 2023.

In concrete terms, my duties included:

• leading the company with energy, empathy, and resilience
• creating digital products in the financial space
• understanding great technical complexity and describing it in simple words
• developing, communicating, and implementing the product vision
• line management of business-critical teams
• responsibility for budgets and the management of information technology
• a focus on growth
• …

The financial world will change

As a Chief Information Officer, you need a range of hard and soft skills to hold your own in this job. At a very basic level, CIOs need to know how to run a business, because the job requires a lot of knowledge about it. CIOs should also keep up with technology trends, as IT can change within two to three years. A person in this role needs to build relationships with other executives within the organization and with peers in the field.

A CIO needs to know how each department of a company works in order to determine the technical needs of each business line, and this person needs to excel at communication. The ability to translate technical terms in a way that non-IT staff can easily understand is critical. A CIO oversees a range of data-related functions to make sure an organization gets the most out of its most important assets. The typical work of a Chief Information Officer includes areas such as data quality, data governance, data stewardship, information strategy, data science, and business analytics. The Chief Information Officer’s responsibilities include, but are not limited to: spreading and communicating a product vision as a critical component of the growth strategy; creating strategic data access policies; leading the design of analytics infrastructure; developing and implementing a central data strategy to increase sales; overseeing data governance, data investments, and partnerships; developing strategy with C-level colleagues and managing directors; and more.

Alongside these more formal business-related goals, my job also involved leading the company in successfully designing, launching, and commercializing financial data products. I worked for Blocksize Capital until November 2024.