Asking whether CIOs will play a strategic or supporting role is indulging in a stale debate. The more important question is whether CIOs are prepared to lead their organizations into a future environment that could be completely unlike today.
Hot technology trends are heating up the debate about the future of the CIO. Do cloud computing services and consumer technology create new opportunities for competitive advantage, or do they reduce the importance of CIOs by giving every business access to the same technologies? Executives and employees are making IT decisions in their personal lives and getting more comfortable making them in their business lives. Will employees choose their own devices, and line managers make more IT decisions?
These developments have made envisioning the future of IT organizations and their leaders more complicated. Analysts and executives are questioning the purpose of the CIO. One in five business executives admit to having a clear vision of what the CIO role will look like by 2016.
Our view? If only the issues were that simple. The key question about the future of the CIO isn’t how today’s technology developments will affect it. It’s what tomorrow could demand of CIOs, and whether CIOs can stretch themselves to lead their organizations into a future unlike today’s.
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Not one future, but many
Enterprise IT doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Our research into the future of enterprise IT found more than 60 forces that will shape IT’s future. Geopolitical forces such as regulations, international relations, nationalism and protectionism. Cultural forces, such as the how consumer technologies affect how people work, play, learn, shop, share and talk. Business forces such as globalization, new approaches to innovation and data-driven decision-making. Disruptive forces such as the vulnerability of technology and information and disruptive disasters.
How will they come together? We see four different possible futures.
There’s the peaceful, interconnected, global and technology-loving future many technologists assume will happen. It’s an ideal environment for IT innovation and use, but also for ferocious global competition. There’s the opposite, worst-case scenario: the World Wide Web is shredded by state-sponsored cyber-attacks and wars that rip and cripple the global economy, drive people off the Internet, and make trustworthy data as rare as unicorns.
Another possibility is less dramatic but still dire: globalization stays strong but cyber-crime and other privacy anxieties scale back Internet activity and slow down IT innovation. Another future is the one mainstream political leaders worry about: Where, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2012 report warns, “The potentially potent combination of chronic labor market imbalances, chronic fiscal imbalances and severe disparity… lead to a retrenchment from globalization” and the world becomes “more fragmented, inconsistent and mistrustful.”[i]
Tomorrow’s demands and tomorrow’s CIOs
Each future will inscribe its own job description for CIOs.
In worlds where IT retrenches or the World Wide Web unravels, nothing will be more urgent for CIOs than risk management, data security, and building a post-Internet IT architecture. If the future is flat and globally connected, two kinds of top IT leaders will emerge: powerful executives who focus on creating and executing strategy creation and managing customer and partner relationships at companies that compete by being technology leaders, and IT service delivery managers at companies where IT does not drive market leadership.
Consider what life will be like for CIOs in a fragmenting world. Global companies will become confederations of locally managed businesses. Local IT executives will be on the front line of IT decision-making. They will create IT strategies that support local business strategies, run systems and contract local services, and develop new systems that meet local needs. The global CIO’s job will be to support the local IT units: communicating global IT needs, establishing architectural, data and security standards so whatever collaboration and interoperability required can take place, and transferring best practices and innovations from local business unit to others.