Michael Dawisha has been CIO across managed care, higher education, hospitality, and county government. He has led technology at Michigan State University's residential and hospitality services, at the Detroit Athletic Club, and now at Genesee County in Michigan, where he oversees IT for more than 1,000 county employees. He has held the title long enough to watch the political dynamics repeat across sectors, and long enough to watch something more recent: the role losing ground.
Thirty years of cross-sector experience taught him that the value of the CIO depends entirely on the ability to translate between IT and the business. "I spent 30 years un-ITing myself just so that I could be part of the organization," he said. "But I have to bring the IT with me. Otherwise, where's my value?"
That paradox is the constant. The sector changes. The translation requirement does not.
What Stays the Same
Across every organization he has worked in, the CIO's political position has been roughly the same: visible enough to be blamed, not always included in the decisions that matter. The fight for relevance is not unique to government. "I've had to fight and struggle for every inch I've gotten," he said. "There was no red carpet."
The resistance, he believes, is partly structural. Non-technology leaders experience IT as something that happens to them. Getting past that requires the CIO to operate in business terms. At Genesee County, that means framing decisions around what citizens need. At Michigan State, it meant speaking in terms of what students needed. When he took on marketing responsibilities during his time in higher education, it confirmed what he already suspected: the CIO who stays inside the technology conversation limits the role.
Credibility, when it comes, tends to arrive in concentrated moments. A new administrative headquarters, an intranet launch, and an AV overhaul landed at roughly the same time at Genesee County. Departments that had been skeptical started saying there was no way they could have done it without him. "The wins start to come in like an avalanche," he said.
The Fear He Brings to the Futurist Title
Dawisha received the Futurist CIO Award from CXO Inc for the second consecutive year just weeks before this conversation. His view of the future of the role is not what the award title might suggest.
A decade ago, the self-service movement in consumer apps created the first version of a problem CIOs still face: people assembling their own solutions and questioning why they needed IT at all. The CIO's response was to absorb demand, build governance, and ask departments to wait. People waited because they had to.
AI has removed the willingness to wait. Every department is now receiving vendor promises, delivered daily, that bypass procurement and security review entirely. It is a pressure even a well-run shop cannot outrun. "I don't know how to keep these people at bay when they come at me every single day," Dawisha said. The governance infrastructure the CIO built to protect the organization starts to look like the obstacle. The danger is not just rogue tools. It is the seat the CIO used to occupy when those decisions were made.
The reporting structure is moving in the same direction. CIOs reporting directly to the CEO was once a rough measure of whether IT was treated as a strategic function. Dawisha has watched that ratio shift back toward the CFO. "I think it's going the other direction," he said. "And I fear it."
The Check He Keeps in Place
His team of 28 meets every morning. He brings decisions to them before taking them upstairs, not as a formality but because he has learned his people are more cautious than his executives. That caution is useful. His own optimism needs a check.
The biggest recent decision, a full migration from traditional telephony to VoIP, was one he approached carefully. Government, he thought initially, might not be ready for it. The team moved forward and it held.
His advice for a CIO entering a new role reflects what three decades of sector-jumping taught him about where things go wrong.
"Be patient and be humble. When you bring something that's going to affect other people, make sure that you don't run them over. It's bad news."