I am attending the Gartner symposium this week, on the topic of “emerging technologies”. After a full day of breakout sessions, it seems that there is a theme running through the track that I have chosen. It is that the futuristic CIO is going to be very different from the CIOs today. Many of the current CIOs could be CTO in another company – they are very technically-minded, understand technology in at least a broad sense, and some are even quite deep in some technical areas. They are concerned about uptime, managing risk and maintaining business continuity. They manage technology, and consider themselves to be a service organization to the business.
The CIO of tomorrow will be very different. They will be concerned about maintaining services, and providing good experiences for all consumers: both internal and external to their company. They will be an integral part of the business, not a service organization to the business. In fact, they will be part of business decisions, not looped in after the fact to simply enable a prior decision to be carried out. They will be concerned about managing information, not technology (these are very different things, incidentally). The CIO of tomorrow may not even have a technology background – they won’t need to even understand technology very broadly at all.
Very interesting. And vaguely familiar…(I posted a blog entry last year on this topic). It will be fun to watch the CIO role evolve over the next few years…