Dr. Elliot King

In almost stealth fashion, the last five years have been a period of incredible innovation in corporate IT. The emergence of Cloud Computing, Software As A Service, the demand for mobility, the drive towards virtualization and the recognition of the importance of Big Data are leading to profound changes in the way organizations generate, communicate, apply and store data. And while the changes may not be as flashy and in-your-face as the previous IT revolutions launched by the personal computer and the Internet, they may be just as profound.

Not surprisingly, these changes are having serious impact on the role of the CIO. At the risk of oversimplifying what has always been a complex job, for the last generation of corporate computing, the CIO has largely headed an internal service organization. The IT department was geared to addressing the needs of its customers identifying the underlying technology needed to build required information systems, building and rolling the systems out, supporting them and ensuring that Service Level Agreements were met. Sure, there was usually a strategy component to the job, as well as the responsibility to conduct surveillance to identify new opportunities, but the customer/provider model dominated. 

That paradigm may no longer be appropriate. First, with the growth of Software As A Service and Cloud Computing, increasingly there is less need to actually build internal systems and in many cases the software vendor or cloud service provider has become increasingly responsible for support.  Moreover, in a sense, mobility has expanded the reach of the company network exponentially, but mobility also relies on external technology. Finally, the pressure to make better use of corporate data means specific information systems have to be more integrated than ever before.

So rather than being the head of just a service organization trying to guarantee Service Level Agreements, the role of the CIO may be better conceptualized as the head of a partner or collaborative organization helping to guide its business partners in ways that can help them meet their business goals. As the head of a partner organization, the CIO should advise colleagues concerning which vendors to work with to acquire specific functionality. The CIO should be a process management expert, able to identify which information systems interact with each other to ensure that processes are reliable, effective and efficient.  And the CIO should be a scout, uncovering solutions to problems that perhaps the business partners didn’t even know they had.

Of course, change in the corporate world is not like throwing a switch. The CIO still has to ensure that the information infrastructure meets the needs of the organization. But the skills needed to do that are clearly changing. Is your role as CIO changing to meet the need for new skills in your organization? 

Image contributed by: Michelle Meiklejohn