Friday, March 26, 2010
The CIO who could be king
Posted by:
Brian Pereira
Some folks in the industry feel the importance of the CIOs role and his authority are diminishing. Some go so far as to ask if an organization will need a CIO at all in future. Many technology savvy companies have CTOs to provide technology directions. We’ve heard ever so often how the CIO role is now oriented towards business (and less on the technology side). Well, smaller companies will continue to have a CIO though they prefer titles like “IT Manager” or “IT Head”.
In most cases, the CIO talks to the CFO—but not directly to the CEO. In fact, the CEO is likely to take the CFO’s word more seriously. Well, that’s about to change soon and the changing model for IT delivery has a lot to do with it.
All along we’ve had an IT department that was a cost center. So there was a budget at the beginning of the year, a planned CAPEX. And IT heads had to manage with this. It got worse. As the recession came along budgets were cut drastically. And everyone wanted to get more from IT, without spending more. That’s when we realized that the only way to do this was to consolidate and virtualize the infrastructure. In doing so, we had more control over the infrastructure and we could monitor the utilization of resources. We could provision on the fly and also meter and charge for the utilization of resources. And hence we moved from an application-centric model to a service-centric one. The IT department can now offer the SBUs services and charge for the use of resources. The IT department becomes a service provider and the SBUs are its customers. That makes the IT department a profit center and the CIO becomes like the president or VP of this department.
And then the CEO and CFO want to meet Mr. CIO to discuss how he can make his profit center more profitable.
So, if you are a CIO, how do you see your role evolving in this changing scenario?
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