The days of the CIO as a viable member of the corporate C-suite may be numbered unless the role evolves beyond its current operational, shared-service mentality, according to Patrick Gray, author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology.
In this thought-provoking essay “The CIO is Dead (Long Live the CIO),” he says one reason is because of the technological savvy of today’s younger workers.
“Much has been written about the new generation of workers advancing through the ranks, a generation who grew up with technology, and spent their university years playing with Facebook and Linux years before ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘open source’ were bandied about in the boardroom. No longer the sole province of the computer science majors, the rising stars in your marketing, sales, finance and operational roles likely know more about technology than some of your IT staff. Integrating technology into their jobs is as effortless as breathing, and a monolithic IT organization that strives to block them from deploying relevant technology into the groups they manage is an anachronism to be worked around, rather than a critical resource.”
He continues:
“Aside from large-scale infrastructure like networks and provisioning hardware and software, nearly every new IT trend points towards those in operational roles making technical decisions, rather than leaving the task to corporate IT. Virtualization, cloud computing, Web 2.0, etc. will all push the implementation of new services to end users, and unless IT evolves, it will fade into a utility that is expected to be seen and not heard.”