Dave Berlind finds himself with a few parting words to say before the theme music kicks in and the closing credits roll.

Dave is commenting on a rather brief debate that was kicked off, at least in part, here earlier this month when I commented on a Bob Evans story in Information Week detailing his difficulties identifying CIOs in major corporations. One of those corporations may well have been BT, where Dave's colleague Dan Farber quotes managing director JP Rangaswami as saying "that the CIO role could disappear within the decade because all senior managers and board members will have to be knowledgable about IT and that's almost a given for the YouTube generation."

This fits in nicely with my own thesis in the matter, but Dave questions whether or not the question is quite so simple, and I find myself agreeing with him as well. In particular, a link he provides to another article which I had missed on the wisdom of outsourcing the details, but retaining the authority struck a cord, because it's very similar to advice I often give existing clients: outsourcing makes sense, as long as you retain decision-making in-house. And that, if nothing is, is the role of CIO, isn't it? As Dave says, IT may become a commodity, but someone still has to be knowledgeable enough to make a good buy in a commodity market. He argues that smaller businesses, particularly, may require someone in that role for the foreseeable future.

These arguments aren't really at odds, and I am not sure that I agree that the size of the business will be the distinguishing factor in whether or not a specific organization retains or requires a CIO. The key point, really, is to ensure that you are retaining control of the decision making process in critical processes, and not simply engaging in a game of outsourcing the blame. I think the trend toward simplifying and modularizing IT services and equipment will continue to the point where most well-educated business managers in most businesses will be able to unhinge strategy from specific and detailed technical questions sufficiently to do without a dedicated CIO. But there will continue to be markets in which the bleeding edge of the technology will require someone with sufficient technical expertise to help make those decisions, and so the CIO will not die out entirely... but there's a lot of room out toward that sunset for the rest of us.