The Transformational CIO: Leadership and Innovation Strategies for IT Executives in a Rapidly Changing World

The Age of Immediacy

When I was a younger man, I had a vision of the future. In my imagination, the future was a gleaming, pristine community of parks, lakes, and buildings, neither city nor suburb, bustling with human energy, but never so crowded or so noisy as to seem oppressive. It was mostly a place of peace, tranquility, and harmony.

I think I got the “bustling with human energy” piece of the vision right. The “peace, tranquility, and harmony” part now seems a bit off the mark. Instead of making our lives easier and less complicated, many of our newer technologies have had the opposite effect: We're busier and more harried than ever.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Frankly, most of us would rather be busy than bored. But for those of us who make our living in the IT space, the newer technologies are having an impact that few of us were able to foresee.

Now that everyone, it seems, has some kind of smartphone and access to a high-speed Internet connection, the pace of life has really picked up dramatically. You all know what I'm talking about, so there's no point in belaboring it.

From a business perspective, the broad adoption of these newer technologies has accelerated the demand for newer services. This rapidly accelerating demand for new services is placing a new set of burdens on IT.

We recently asked Stephen Savage, the CIO at CA Technologies (formerly Computer Associates), to chat with us about the evolving relationship between IT and the business. At one point in ...