Seeing Things
It is already apparent that in the long-term CIOs will need to become innovation leaders and transform themselves into company visionaries if they want to thrive in the future. They’re likely to spend increasing amounts of time devising strategy and figuring out new ways to use information and emerging technologies. Technological acumen is likely to be far less valuable to them than business acumen and vision as they switch their focus to the big picture.
As US CIO magazine writer Christopher Koch noted in an article called The Post-Modern Manifesto in 2007, to prepare themselves for the future CIOs must eschew the role of infrastructure steward and transform themselves into innovation leaders — and then remake their departments in that image.
Koch says the service-fulfilment model for IT is dying and a new philosophy of innovation and productivity is being born.
“The post-modern IT department will be smaller, more distributed and dependent on a tightly integrated supply chain of vendors,” Koch writes. “It will be in desperate need of multitalented specialists who have in-depth technology knowledge but who can also create new products and capabilities that businesspeople might never have envisioned.
“CIOs will need to transform themselves into innovation leaders, not merely infrastructure stewards, and they will have to remake their departments in that image. IT will need to be a full partner, if not a leader, in business process innovation.”
CIO for AMP Banking Lee Barnett says that’s a journey that she — and hence her IT organisation — has been on for a while. And she also thinks CIOs are set to increasingly be viewed as “the project carriage experts and process experts across the organisation”.
“Work is going global, we are in the Information Age, and the global economy is shifting more and more towards services and knowledge work,” notes Director ICT investment and governance at SA Government Shayne Phillips.
For all these reasons, the CIO of the future will be running things very differently than they do today.
Phillips says IT is becoming a stimulus for and enabler of business innovation, making its seat at the big desk more critical. “The future CIO is the key collaborator in a process that develops both the corporation’s business and IT strategies in concert, especially as the various operational business models of the corporations catch up with the global economic and technology changes currently in play,” he says.
Phillips believes in the future CIOs will have an extended organisation made up of at least three main streams:
• Strategy and vision • Portfolio corporate governance and investment • Portfolio (traditional) service delivery
Under each of these will be a variety of full-time, contract and outsourced personnel, all streamlined and collaborating to make the entire value ecosystem operate as per the business expectations in real-time. The augmentation of the resource pool into “as needed collaborative teams” will be mandatory as the global skill shortage takes full effect and the baby boomers retire.
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