The numbers facing ambitious IT managers do not look promising: only 4% of chief executives are former chief information officers, with most CEOs taking the job after being chief financial officer (29%) or chief operating officer (23%), according to an analysis of 685 CEOs in the Forbes 2000 list.

And, while many CIOs see themselves as potential CEOs, more than half of those questioned (58%) said their progression into general management was held back because they were pigeonholed as technical specialists; 22% reported a poor relationship with their CEO.

Businesses are missing an opportunity by failing to consider their CIOs in succession planning, said Colin Bannister, a vice-president at CA Technologies, the IT consultancy that commissioned the report, Becoming the Boss. They also need to pay much more attention to the CIO when developing strategy, he added.

“Historically the CIO and his or her team were seen as support people by the rest of the business, but the role is shifting due to the rise of some disruptive technologies ... and economic conditions,” he said.

Disruptive technologies offer the possibility of doing business in an entirely different way rather than doing existing things more effectively.

“They are technologies that create new businesses, new markets, new routes to markets or entries to markets that were not there before,” he said. This gives the CIO an enormous opportunity to demonstrate that IT can shape even non-technology businesses, not simply support them.

However, more than half are not consulted about strategy, though 60% believe they are qualified to contribute; 40% say limited digital literacy at board level has led to missed business opportunities, according to the report, which also questioned more than 600 CIOs.

“They [CIOs] have the necessary business acumen, commercial ability and people management expertise to add considerable strategic value,” says the report. “Too often they lack a forum to share their unique insight with their own leadership team in the boardroom.”

Ester Levanon, who joined the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange as its CIO and is now its CEO, said it is up to CIOs to make sure that they approach their roles as managers first and technical specialists second. “The first thing I did when I started at the Israeli security service [where she set up and ran its computer department] was to make sure that I understood the organisation,” she said.

“Only after that did I deal with anything to do with computers or IT. You have to be connected to the organisation. That’s the difference between a CIO who won’t ever become CEO and the one who will at least have the possibility.”

Start by finding out what the business needs to achieve rather than asking what it needs from you, she said. “If I asked anyone in the organisation what did they want from the IT division, none of them could tell me because they did not know the possibilities of IT.

“So I asked them what they were supposed to do from their point of view and after hearing from them ... my people and I thought about the best things we could do to help them achieve that.”

Heath Jackson, a partner at KPMG, the consultancy, suggested that CIOs at businesses where IT is viewed as a cost centre rather a source of commercial possibilities look for “levers” that will allow them to demonstrate the link between technology and performance.

“It’s very hard to ask a board to start thinking about technical matters,” he said. “A good CIO will be able to articulate what’s happening at a commercial level using language that connects to the board. Do not take technology into the boardroom — take business into the boardroom.

“You have to provide your board with levers so that they know what will happen if they pull them, whether that’s a cost reduction, a service improvement or what have you.”

When Levanon moved to the stock exchange as CIO she reported not to the CFO, as was typical at the time, but directly to the CEO. “It was quite unusual but it was an organisation that understood what could be done with IT, which was the reason I decided to join. I believed that was how you should handle IT departments, because they have the power to change an organisation.”

If CIOs report to CFOs they will only ever be able to answer the problems set by the CFO, whereas if they have a wider view they can also solve wider problems. Most of the ideas about how to develop the stock exchange came from its IT division, said Levanon.

However, despite securing the job she recently heard someone say that it had happened despite her technical background rather than because of it, suggesting that her path was still seen as the exception rather than the rule.

“Even the people who elected me do not think that CEOs should come from IT,” she said. “But anyone in management has the potential to become a CEO. It does not have to be because they were CIO, but certainly being CIO does not rule them out.”