The CIO is often the only executive role where you are not directly responsible or involved in the delivery of organisational value and there is no legal or compliance need for the role. This is changing slowly as technology is increasingly embedded into products and services and as we create business models, which are completely dependent on online delivery, but it is still the norm.
Think about it. Value creation is usually led by a COO with support from sales marketing and some form of product or service delivery function. Other executive mainstays include the CFO, human resource and often risk and legal. While these are clearly important business roles they have significant legal and compliance issues at their heart.