Strategic IT: Best Practices for Managers and Executives

Chapter 8

The Non-IT CIO of the Future

This chapter attempts to foresee the future of the chief information officer (CIO) position. We have presented in previous chapters the responsibilities challenging CIOs today, and using future trends we forecast some of the short and long-term opportunities of the CIO. We see the position migrating toward more of a chief of automation's being functionally responsible for contracts, equipment management, general automation, and outsourcing while having a central role in conversations strategically leveraging emerging new technologies. We believe that the term CIO needs to be reinvented, with less focus on the information technology (IT) side and much more emphasis on automation and innovations that will continue to drive new business opportunities while lowering costs.

The first aspect of attempting to forecast the CIOs of the future is to avoid trying to predict their new title, rather to explore more the roles and responsibilities that these executives will need to manage. To be consistent with our research findings, we start with Langer's driver-support theory, which addresses much of the future needs of the position.

Driver-Side Responsibilities—New Automation

CIOs of the future will need to spend much of their time with the business, helping to develop strategic advantages through applications of automation. Note that we use the term automation as opposed to IT or even technology. We think this is a critical shift in responsibilities. ...