Do you believe revenue should be an official metric for CIOs? Why or why not?

All executives should have a revenue component in their MBO’s & metrics just like expense and profit margin. Depending where the CIO sits in the organization the weight of these metric obviously changes.

Yes it needs to be an official metric for the CIO's too. Else it will be an academic endeavor for the CIOs in their organizations.

This question often leads to bogus outcomes. The CEO wants to tell the board that all of the exec team are measured on financial metrics (revenue, FCF, EBITDA...take your pick) but not all of them are equally empowered to affect the metric. So it should really be weighted on the ability to influence it. And there should be a 2-way street. It makes no sense to measure the CIO on revenue if the head of sales doesn’t enforce adoption of sales tools and allows operational problems to build which increases opex and reduces customer sat. So if you want the CIO to accept a revenue target, then also assign the other c-suite some IT metrics so we don’t get ridiculous amounts of shadow IT, duplication of data and other negative outcomes. My main point - hold executives accountable for the things they can do based on their scope of responsibility and what is reasonable in partnership with peers.

I believe revenue should become official metric for CIOs as well like other C-Level executives. In this way, CIO importance in the organisation will gradually increase from cost center to profit center. If a CIO is working in a sales oriented company then he should also be an active member helping organisation in increasing sales and on the other hand facilitating company in providing real-time dashboards to gauge sales.     

Well said, and to add to this, the CIO is always at risk if there is a significant security breach or if the business does not meet its objectives because of systems issues.  One company I had worked for, the CIO shut down significant portion of DR for about 3 years and saved a lot of money, and looked like a genius. Luckily, there was no disaster or significant disruption in business.