The Chief Process Officer, or CPO is an executive responsible for defining processes for an organization to follow. CPO's are usually experts in CMM or CMMI and ISO black belts. The CPO was first mentioned by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar in articles that led to the publication of Business Process Management: The Third Wave [1]. The CPO must distinguish himself from the pure IT manager. Although IT will continue to be a management task, it won't have the same importance in future. Pure infrastructure management—i.e.of hardware, operating systems, the network and all these things—will be standardized. It will then no longer be a strategic field, but a purely cost-oriented one. But anything beyond this or related to business management will increase in importance. That is precisely where IT adds value: in enhancing the efficiency of business processes. For this, the organizations need a manager who thinks at process level and business management level. Obviously, he also requires good strategic IT knowledge. That's the CPO.[Morteza Moalagh/By Dr Wolfram Jost]
