"Organizations will need CIOs to guard against disintegration. This will require a full-time expert with plenty of leadership ability and a whole new set of skills in the area of corporate information dysfunction, personal and organizational technology adoption, and the role IT plays in shaping and reshaping corporate culture."

Opening Statement

Welcome to the Cutter "Future of the CIO" pool! At one end of the pool, we hear all the paranoid negatives. IT is not strategic, so CIOs will be reduced to technology caretakers and vendor managers, as they should be. CIOs are strategically dim-witted and not as sharp as the business in matters of IT and business value, so good riddance to the role. IT is now a consumer product that business leaders will buy themselves, bypassing a central IT purchasing and EA regime that seemed to exist only to stymie the strategy artisans in the business units. Web and Enterprise 2.0 have freed the business from the clutches of central IT and enabled so many benefits that we can stop thinking about corporate IT in the old way.

At the other end of the pool, we hear the superlative positives. IT matters greatly to both strategy and the role of the CIO. CIOs will be called upon to both innovate and automate. CIOs of the future will be strategic business leaders first and technology experts second. IT is not a consumer business; only the more regimented, standardized, and high-volume pieces are consumer products. The shape and flow of information will still need to be tightly fitted to organizations, and CIOs will have a strong, if not dominant, role in this information customization. The ability of businesses to analyze and act on data is a competitive skill, and CIOs will be expected to help lead in the development of this capability.

Obviously, there's lots of splashing and screaming at both ends of the pool, and in this issue we have thinkers from both ends. To help guide us, I'll offer three tags for the authors' different perspectives:

1. Panglossians have a very optimistic view, if not a slightly rose-colored one, of the CIO's future.

2. Meliorists are somewhat in the middle, but they do believe that human effort will improve things.

3. Cassandras prophesy disaster and misfortune and utter warnings that go unheeded.

Now that I have set the scene a bit, let's dive in. We begin with a contribution by Steve Andriole, who -- based on his provocative piece here and other Cutter writings -- might best be described by quoting the Joker from the movie Dark Knight:

I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.

Andriole is prophesying something far worse than a tiny dollop of misfortune for the CIO. He claims that in the future, because technology will be heavily outsourced, organizations won't need much more than an IT infrastructure manager to keep the communications infrastructure going. Strategic uses of IT will be solidly in the clutches of business unit leaders, who have always owned the requirements anyway. Taking some editorial liberty here, I would argue that Andriole's Cassandra-like view of the role of the CIO actually requires a Panglossian view of both the business units' strategic acumen and IT itself. For businesses to no longer need a CIO, both IT hardware/software and business requirements have to be in, as Andriole puts it, a "steady state." He says we will witness a "kind of business technology convergence that takes the business technology relationship to a new level." Along the way, CIOs will become inevitable "roadkill" somewhere after 2015. Andriole acknowledges that CIOs have worked tirelessly to create the reliable technology architecture that has enabled this new steady state and, as a result, have inadvertently eliminated their own jobs.

In our next article, futurist Thornton May -- whom I will describe as partly Panglossian, partly Meliorist -- foresees growth in the role of the CIO, latching onto leadership as the key issue of the day. May acknowledges, however, that several types of CIOs may have difficulty over the next few years. In particular, he predicts that the following types of CIOs will probably go extinct:

• The "In-Name-Only" CIO (big title, small job)

• The "In-Box" CIO (caretaker, not strategic)

• The "Über-Project Manager" CIO (last person standing after the megaproject)

What types of CIOs will thrive? According to May, those who possess self-knowledge, empathy, sensemaking skills, strategic vision, and innovation skills are likely to do well. Timeless advice.

Bob Gariano's contribution, more Meliorist in nature, is highly instructive. A successful business executive and executive recruiter, Gariano identifies three attributes that companies tend to rank highly for CIOs: technical knowledge, business acumen, and leadership. He also notes that the attention companies typically allocate to each of these three areas in the interviewing process (70%, 20%, and 10%, respectively), is the exact opposite of their importance in determining CIO success. The majority of the time, departing CIOs were asked to leave due to their inability to build high-performance teams or inspire and motivate those around them. Gariano's research shows that CIOs hired for their perceived technical skills are often fired for their lack of leadership skills. Like May, Gariano argues that companies and CIOs need to attend to the leadership dimension of the role.

CIOs have much more work to do to reinvent themselves, according to Meliorist Bob Charette, who suggests that the CIO role went off the rails decades ago when it became linked to a misguided conception of automation. Charette tells the story of A.R. Zipf, the man credited with automating check processing at Bank of America (BofA). Zipf's success in reducing BofA's internal business costs, particularly through personnel elimination, set a pattern that persists to this day. Rather than focusing on the customer, IT has concentrated on reducing internal organizational risks -- and thus was the business-IT alignment problem born. Charette offers CIOs a better historical model in Dr. Henry Plummer, who revolutionized medical records keeping at the world-famous Mayo Clinic. By always putting the patient's needs first, Plummer ensured that business (i.e., patient care) and technology would stay in sync at Mayo -- which has never had to fire a CIO. The future isn't decided yet, Charette concludes, and what CIOs do will determine that future. CIOs only need to look to the past to understand what a better future could hold.

Pat Moroney calls for something in between CIO elevation and extinction: evolution. Given all the challenges they've faced, Moroney wonders how CIOs ever survived at all. But they have, and the role is changing. Successful CIOs will need to focus on projecting confidence, having a thick skin, being perceived as fellow businesspeople rather than techno-geeks, ensuring transparency, and managing constant change and growth. Ever the Meliorist, Moroney acknowledges that in one respect, Andriole's vision of the future role of the CIO may be correct. If they haven't done so already, technology-intense firms may split the CIO role into two: a C-level person with R&D responsibilities for core products and a lesser VP-IT role for the person running IT development, information services, and infrastructure.

In Eric Brown and Gene De Libero's view, the future CIO will be less concerned with "keeping the lights on" and more with looking for ways to use IT to help the company compete. Commodity platforms, open systems, and cloud computing won't obviate CIOs, but rather give them more tools for creating competitive advantage for their companies. And thus we end this issue on a nice Panglossian note.

MY PREDICTIONS

It has been painful to watch the perennial angst of the CIO community. Each year, each conference, and each industry rag frets about what ails the CIO and what kind of CIO the CIO will need to be in the future. When viewed as a whole, the CIO community is paranoid and schizophrenic. Not only do we hear multiple conflicting voices in our collective heads, we have a sense that the future we created is out to get us.

Whenever the IT industry contemplates the future of the IT organization and its leadership, I often say to myself, "Surely we are not alone!" So I decided to take a look at what pundits are saying about the future of a similar but different role: the CFO. After all, both the CFO and the CIO are central administration roles, both are deeply concerned about risk, and both require a fair amount of arcane technical subject matter expertise.

Interestingly, with the financial crisis in our rear-view mirror, some pundits are asking that the CFO play an important but a distinct role: that of the corporate conscience for the firm. On the other hand, some pundits are expecting the end of the CFO role as we have come to know it. The CFO will likely find more and more of his or her functions outsourced or achieved through joint ventures. The role is now shifting to one that manages transactions but still demands communication and strategic skills. This will require a new kind of CFO who puts much less emphasis on old-style accounting skills and more on determining corporate strategy and leading company-wide initiatives to enhance corporate performance, reputation management, corporate governance, global marketing, compensation policies (including executives), treasury functions, and financial analytics.

Does this sound familiar? IT may be enabling the disemboweling of more than just the CIO role. What next? A crowd-sourced CEO role? Oh, excuse me, that's the stock market. How about a fully democratized, Enterprise 2.0-enabled, bottom-up organization requiring very few executive roles? I suspect that these kinds of management innovations may arise from time to time, but will these experiments endure? Have they so far? Not on football teams, not in governments, and not in corporations. It is instructive to understand why this is so.

Amid all the cacophony regarding C-level roles, human nature does not change. Roles of all kinds are best understood by considering what unique skills and knowledge they require and how those skills and knowledge distinguish one role from another. To argue that the CIO role will disappear is to suggest that IT is no longer complex or mutable and does not rise to a level of management difficulty that requires a C-level executive to attend to it. This means that at some level in the organization, and probably very high, dabblers and part-time professionals will be sufficient.

Alternatively, if you still wish to predict that the CIO role will disappear but still believe IT to be strategic, you would have to assume that CTOs within business units would need to be deeply knowledgeable about IT because of its increasing, not decreasing, complexity. Simple IT can't be strategic. All these business unit CTOs would need to share plans, share data, collaborate, pick vendors that also are compatible with each other, and choose integration approaches that allow easy and rapid description and sharing of data, including rapidly evolving, high-volume data with a still somewhat unpredictable structure. This scenario would require me to believe two incredible things:

1. That IT itself (vendors and tools included) won't be changing as quickly as heretofore and will be open and integrated

2. That organizations will know how to keep silos from recurring with a distributed pool of IT managers

Always in motion the future is. And the speed of that motion isn't decreasing. Information is perpetually mutable and increasing in its rate of transmission, growth, and mutation. Because of information's explosive, fast mutability, bending information so that it can't flow easily is a tactic that vendors and corporate executives will continually use to confer advantage on their firms or their position in the pantheon of executive roles. This will create continued market and boardroom friction. The CIO role has been and will continue to be focused on the integration of the firm, knowing that integration today means the way information flows and knowledge is created across the enterprise.

Organizations will need CIOs to guard against disintegration. This will require a full-time expert with plenty of leadership ability and a whole new set of skills in the areas of corporate information dysfunction, personal and organizational technology adoption, and the role IT plays in shaping and reshaping corporate culture. Individual and collective cognition is intertwined with IT. Being continually complex, pliable, and mutable, IT will be bent in a myriad of bad ways to fit human failings. Companies will need CIOs to prevent and cure the organizational information dysfunctions as they appear.

But I am just one voice on this topic, and I could be utterly wrong. Our authors have many more interesting things to say on this topic. I suggest we all listen to them carefully.

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