The trend to utility computing and package solutions is also incontrovertible, Rowsell-Jones says. For instance, one turnaround CIO he knows, whose organisation’s rapid growth was pinned on innovative proprietary software, is now moving to outsourced commodity technology and a dramatic reduction in numbers of people in the IT shop. “I think the point about him and his ilk is that he represents the future in the sense that he is deliberately going out to the business to commoditise what has hitherto been proprietary technology with a view to being able to expand the reach of [the organisation] so that he has scale flexibility,” Rowsell-Jones says.
“He can run operations in cities around the world without the constraints of having to go out in a complex process of hiring new staff to do it. So he’s using commoditised, standard issue vanilla boxes, and as much vanilla software as possible, because he can find the skills on the open market which give him that scale flexibility, and ultimately his cost reduction. I think that is the way of the future. The rate limiting step is that legacy assets continue to trip up many IT organisations.
“Rubbing the crystal ball at one level, the IT role is not likely to be very different in five years,” Rowsell-Jones says. “If you look at the way the trend is taking you, increasingly IT is an integrator of other people’s services. There are all sorts of geographical and historical technological curiosities that prevent you from going to this model, but all they are going to do is slow you down; they’re not going to stop the inexorable move towards something other than basic pro-vision of IT services.”
Strategic Differentiator
And those trends are global. Dawn Lim, client manager, executive education, for Graduate Business School INSEAD/The Business School for the World, recently ran a small CIO forum which gathered some 25 to 30 cross-industry CIOs from across Singapore. Many of the CIOs present knew that being included in the strategic conversation with the other C-level execs was crucial if they were to add real value and ensure the durability of their roles into the future.
“That said, not many can say with certainty they are included from the outset. However, many more are included in the strategic conversation now compared to previous years,” Lim says.
“In discussing how they lobby for IT to be seen as a strategic differentiator, several CIOs remarked that by wearing multiple different hats (marketing, HR etc.), they start to demonstrate their value-add to the business, and thus, gain acceptance into the C-suite more easily. This is seen as a potential way for CIOs to get included in the strategic conversation.”
Andrew Baker, vice president of IT operations at US database marketing and Web services solution supplier ARGI, says there’s little doubt the CIO role will change to reflect the changes that many businesses will face during the next five years. CIOs will need to field an increasingly flexible team that can balance both the tactical and strategic needs of the business.
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