A few days back I posted an article on my blog with a title of
“Will your organisation need a CIO by 2020?”. The title was meant to be provocative and the subject matter explored top 5 disruptive themes which today’s CIO practice are facing. As many of the forums and individual reviewers have since then remarked, the real question which needs to be explored is how will the role of CIO evolve? This post summarises the approaches and options for such an evolution.
Over a period of next few years should the role of CIO evolve to become a “CPO” or even a “CPPO”? (ref. John Clarke). The purpose of technology and information is to enhance the People in the Organisation, and there respective Productivity. So CIO may be less ‘I’ and more ‘P’ Productivity and People. IT will continue to play a key role in organisations. What will change, is the way that IT is packaged, used and managed. While the roles (and titles) may change, organisations will continue to need highly trained, experienced and competent professionals to plan and execute their technology mandates. These changes will also drive firms to think more on how to use IT in their business and less about how to develop and maintain it. This will mean a rethinking of core competencies for some companies – both the service users and providers. (ref. Ryan Jones)
There seems to be a myth that, CIO role is about technology rather than information, confusing, as so many do, the respective roles of CIO and CTO. The CIO role is about information, not technology. Information is not going to go out of fashion, nor is valuable information going to be commoditised. In many cases the CIO role has devolved to technology management from its true purpose of Information, in part due to aspirational IT managers and CTOs who think that being a CIO is about managing IT, instead of performing their corporate duty of supporting strategy through information (ref. Steve Burrows).
The CIO role will remain crucial, and remain at board level if his/her brief is to maximise the amount of knowledge available to the business at the right place, distilled from the “income of information” the company is generating. This knowledge is in effect part of the company’s balance sheet. The CTO is less likely to be a board member and may be superfluous in situations where the IT provided by outsourced services. If so then the CIO is effectively the solution architect. (ref. Stephen Clothier)
However there still remains a strong school of thought which proposed that, the CIO role will not evolve; it will revert to simpler times and will eventually disappear. CIOs such as
Jem Eskenazi argue that, SOA, web services, SaaS, the Cloud, are abstracting information management from the underlying technology. At the same time, a new generation of executive management has a much better understanding of how IT can help their companies. The convergence of these two means that soon non-IT management will be able to specify and procure IT services without the help of a C-level expert.
In conclusion then the role of CIO is intrinsically linked with the state of IT industry and even more so with the business environment which surrounds it. Technology trends may come or go but the importance of information is paramount for modern business. As
Paul Coby summarised his thoughts from a recent industry event,
“IT matters even more than before, because it is leveraging social and economic change much more than ever before. The role of the CIO or IT Director is to make sense of all this change and of all these possibilities. IT providers are central to businesses in new ways. Yes, of course, for Operations; yes, of course, for Selling and for Servicing; but now IT is central to the whole Customer Experience. That is new and that is the landmark change.” Responding to my own challenges then, yes those five trends which I listed in my original post; Rise of Business Services, Maturing Cloud Computing, Business Analytics coming of Age, Popularity of Application Services and Technology Consumerisation are very much real. Yes they are disruptive to the CIO practice. But the best CIO will interpret them into an advantage position for their respective business. They will understand that Information matters Technology which drives that is probably not. In effect what would matter more is IT benefits realisation.
Would a CIO manage that process or CIO evolves to some other role such as COO or CPO or CITO may not really matter. So the definitive answer then, Yes your organisation will need a CIO by 2020 but he / she will have different set of competencies and capabilities. They may be more oriented towards an Operations function or a Market function or even Sales function. This orientation will depend on business value of IT for respective organisation. But Information Management backed up by effective and cost-efficient technology will be crucial for most modern organisations.
