-Tim

This was a really compelling read. I look forward to reading this series.

I have spoken with a few people about the death of the term “Information Technology” and its eventual replacement, “Business Technology.” With so many changes taking place, I agree that it’s high time for CIOs to either adapt or perish.

Phil

1. I believe that CIOs are now more than ever being asked to shift their focus from internal customers to external customers – specifically, helping to “technology enable” customer contact strategies around call centers, mobile, social, B2B partnerships, etc. in order to help turbo-charge growth. The CIO skill (in some instances, not all) is morphing from “employee focused” to “customer focused” for the next Gen CIO.

2. I’d propose that the security skill be abstracted into a broader focus on corporate risk – in my experience, the discussions today with executive teams focuses more on risk than on discrete security concerns. Business leaders are tired of being beaten over the head with (and funding) security projects. If the investment can help to manage or reduce business risk, then the discussion can move forward and be balanced against other risk-based initiatives, otherwise, if it is simply another “security” project, it does not stand a chance.

3. Finally, it will be interesting to see how these trends impact well entrenched, process-centric frameworks like ITIL – given a shift towards speed, individual decision making and “disruptive” business processes as you mention, will these frameworks become irrelevant over time, or will they also adapt? Not sure, but will be interesting to see what happens, as lots of companies have significant amounts of time and money invested in these frameworks.

Look forward to the next post in the series.

But two things in your list that I’m rather curious about are:

1. Move away from mega-suites to best of breed. Given that the mega-vendors haven’t completely embraced SaaS yet, I get that perhaps it will drive a move to best of breed SaaS providers, but that in an of itself is a relative term. I’m not sure that you can make the case that certain SaaS-based apps would win a best of breed comparison against existing on-premise apps, but that’s a separate discussion. However, doesn’t this recreate the integration challenges that existed previously which set the stage for the growth of the mega-suites (who did acquire many of the BoB software companies to fill vertical or niche gaps in their solutions)? Or do you think that SOA, BPEL and perhaps integration platforms like Boomi solve the problem adequately. I’m not sure I feel strongly either way, but just asking.

2. Change in App Development Strategy. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. I agree that the advent of Cloud and PaaS will accelerate the trend towards a distributed development organization and perhaps remove the designation between direct employees and outsourced product development partners, but “procured through the cloud” sounds like abandoning internal app development initiatives and push COT-C (Commercial Off The Cloud; although not really important whether SaaS or On Premise) solutions. Is this what you’re driving at?