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

A Time for IT Leadership

Every year, I speak with literally thousands of senior-level corporate executives. It's part of my role at HMG Strategy. Some of the conversations are deep and some are perfunctory. The quality of a conversation can be influenced by many variables, including the background of the person I'm chatting with, the topic we're discussing, the time of day, and even the time of year. You can never predict exactly where a conversation will go.

Around the middle part of last year, however, I noticed a trend. Many of the conversations were falling into one of three buckets: cloud, mobile, or social computing. I sensed a harbinger of dramatic change. I wrote an article about it for my newsletter. The headline was New “Perfect Storm” Will Transform IT Industry and Global Economy. Here's the article:

A new “perfect storm” is on the horizon. The convergence of cloud, mobile, and social computing is reshaping the world we live in, and transforming the IT industry as we know it.

Make no mistake: This new convergence is driving the most significant transformation of IT since we put PCs on everyone's desk. This phenomenon is so big that we cannot even begin to guess at the magnitude of the change that will occur. The ripples and aftershocks will be just as transformational as the first wave of changes that we are experiencing now.

In many ways, this new convergence will be even more transformative than the arrival of desktop computing more than two decades ago. Like the desktop ...