Many CIOs, Baker predicts, will find their teams more distributed across the organisation. Rather than leading a single, centralised team, more organisations will employ some level of outsourcing, and some IT-only functions might be more dispersed across the business units.
CIOs will also face challenges related to staffing, ROI, increased government and industry regulation, and global competition for skills and services. They will need to have better business acumen and will more than likely need credentials which give them better credibility with their business leader peers, Baker says.
On the other hand Gregory Smith, vice president and CIO of the Washington-based World Wildlife Fund, believes the likely prognosis to be rather more nuanced. Those who say business executives will fill the CIO role and outsourcing will play into the mix are both right and wrong, he says. Smith agrees outsourcing is here to stay and CIOs will continue to look for functions to outsource in order to keep costs down. “That still requires IT oversight and expertise that a business executive can’t provide,” he says “I’ve personally witnessed business staff who have negotiated IT contracts and services outside of the core IT glass house and many of them have been taken advantage of,” Smith says. “In short, they simply don’t know what to expect, what the capabilities are, what the costs should be, and many don’t have the time to vet these comparisons out. Thus — IT outsourcing still needs an IT pro with a business sense to properly manage.”
Splintering
Technisource Management Services president John Baschab, who has recently completed co-authoring the second edition of a book examining the symptoms and causes of waste, inefficiency and underperformance in typical IT departments, called The Executive’s Guide to Information Technology, says he and co-writer Jon Pilot have spent considerable time contemplating the evolving CIO role.
In their view there is no doubt the role is set to become more business oriented, but he also believes there is starting to be some “splintering of pieces of the role”. Where traditionally the CIO has been the very top technical executive in a company, now some large organisations are dividing the function in two, with a chief technology officer charged with carriage of the technical vision, and the CIO in charge of execution, or with the CIO sharing once traditional aspects of the job with a CSO or a chief architecture or chief standards officer, Baschab says.
“I think that can work well and there actually is a pretty logical split between things that a CTO would do versus functions of the CIO,” he says, “but I also think that there will be the expected arm wrestling over the places where there is overlap — or even gaps.”
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