I recently realized that this September will be the 25th anniversary of the launch of CIO Magazine.
I wrote the cover piece for that first issue — “The New Breed of CIO” — and the first paragraph of my article discussed the emergence of a new group of business leaders who were making “the leap from ‘manager of information systems’ to ‘chief information officer…’ and that these CIOs were taking on a new duty as “promoter of the company’s ‘information vision.’”
And even more recently, I also have come across Gartner’s new “Predicts 2012″ report that discusses “how the control of technology and technology-driven decisions is shifting out of the hands of IT organizations. New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically, the forces of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace.”
And, maybe most interesting (and most ominous for CIOs), Gartner says that “Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new technology before IT departments can harness it.”
There’s a lot to be said for the Garnter position –in fact, it connects with the “Schumpeter on Steroids” description that has come up in previous postings in this blog — and I plan to address and explore the Gartner insights in future postings.
In the meantime, here are some links that some might find of interest.
My September 1987 article about “The New Breed of CIO” (my apologies for the fuzziness of the PDF).
Three documents from Gartner about their Predicts 2012 report:
A press release about the report
A PDF with more extended discussion of the report