The Emerging C-Suite / CDTO
Chief Digital and Technology Officer (CDTO)
Role, mandate, and how it differs from a plain CIO
The Chief Digital and Technology Officer owns both the customer-facing digital business and the internal technology estate — the Chief Digital Officer and CIO/CTO mandates merged into one seat. It is the title a board reaches for when a split CDO/CIO pair created more coordination overhead than the split was ever worth.
Direct answer
A Chief Digital and Technology Officer (CDTO) is a single executive accountable for both digital products and digital revenue, and the technology infrastructure and systems delivery that a CIO would otherwise own separately. Most organizations never had enough distinct digital-revenue work to justify a standalone Chief Digital Officer once a CIO already controlled the infrastructure digital initiatives depend on — the CDTO title collapses that split. It reports to the CEO in enterprise, or sits at the top of the department in government and public-sector bodies, where the role first took hold.
What it is
The role, defined
The split CDO/CIO model assumes digital revenue and technology infrastructure are separable decisions with separate budgets. In most organizations they are not: a digital product roadmap depends on the same data platform, the same cloud infrastructure, and often the same engineering capacity the CIO already allocates. Splitting the mandate creates a coordination tax — two executives negotiating priority on shared infrastructure — without a corresponding benefit, because the "digital revenue" line the split was meant to protect is usually small enough to sit inside the technology budget without distortion.
The public sector adopted the merged title first, and the reason is structural rather than fashionable: government departments and healthcare bodies don't run a separate digital-revenue P&L the way a retailer does, so there was never a real budget boundary between "digital" and "IT" to protect in the first place. The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England appointed Rob Thompson as Chief Digital, Data & Technology Officer in 2026 — a title that names all three mandates explicitly rather than letting "technology" imply the data and digital pieces. Enterprise search is increasingly reaching for the same merged title, for the same underlying reason: the split rarely reflected a real organizational boundary.
The mandate
What a Chief Digital and Technology Officer owns
Digital products & revenue
The customer-facing digital business and the P&L for it, the half of the mandate the standalone CDO used to own alone.
Technology estate & systems delivery
The infrastructure, platforms, and engineering capacity every digital initiative actually runs on — the CIO/CTO half of the mandate.
Data & technology strategy
One strategy for the data platform and the digital products built on it, rather than two roadmaps negotiating for the same capacity.
Digital transformation programs
The multi-year move to digital-by-default, owned end to end instead of split across a CDO's product roadmap and a CIO's infrastructure roadmap.
Org placement
Where the Chief Digital and Technology Officer sits
| Reports to | CEO (enterprise); department head or permanent secretary (government / public sector) |
|---|---|
| Owns | Digital products & revenue, IT infrastructure & systems delivery, data & technology strategy, transformation programs |
| Does not own | Functions the title doesn't explicitly name in the job description — verify scope against the actual mandate, not the title |
| Measured on | Digital revenue and adoption metrics alongside systems reliability, delivery velocity, and technology cost |
| Closest peers | CIO / CTO, Chief Digital Officer |
Decision
When to use the merged CDTO title
You probably need one
- Digital initiatives already depend on infrastructure and data your CIO controls — the split was never a real boundary
- You have no separate digital-revenue P&L large enough to justify a standalone CDO's overhead
- Your organization is public-sector or otherwise budget-unified, with no natural line between "digital" and "IT" spend
- A split CDO/CIO pair is spending meetings negotiating shared infrastructure priority instead of shipping
You probably don't
- Digital revenue is large and genuinely independent of your core technology estate — the split protects a real P&L
- Your technology estate is large enough that infrastructure and systems delivery is already a full-time job on its own
- You want the title change to look like transformation without changing the reporting lines or the budget underneath it
- A plain CIO already has full authority over both — renaming the seat CDTO adds nothing but a longer title
Compensation
What a Chief Digital and Technology Officer earns
Salary.com's 2026 benchmark for the specific "Chief Digital Technology Officer" title puts base compensation at roughly $230K–$365K, averaging around $299K in the United States. That sits above a standalone Chief Digital Officer at comparable scale, reflecting the combined mandate rather than a title premium — the CDTO is priced as one executive doing the accountable work of two, not as a rebranded CIO. Total compensation including bonus and equity runs materially higher at large-enterprise scale, and public-sector compensation for the equivalent title runs on a separate, generally lower, government pay framework.
How it differs
Chief Digital and Technology Officer vs adjacent roles
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Chief Digital and Technology Officer (CDTO)?
Why merge the CDO and CIO/CTO roles instead of keeping them separate?
Is CDTO the same role as a CIO or CTO with an expanded title?
What does a Chief Digital and Technology Officer earn?
Who does a Chief Digital and Technology Officer report to?
Weighing a merged digital-and-technology seat?
I write about technology leadership and org design from inside the C-suite — including when a merged CDTO title reflects a real organizational boundary and when it's a rename with nothing underneath it.