McKinsey says it's "Time to raise the CIO's game" and I couldn't agree more. Don't get me wrong, I am as hesitant as ever to jump on the "this changes everything" bandwagon. I didn't buy into the "we don't need a business plan, we're on the Internet!" game that fueled the dot-com bubble, and I'm not subscribing to the "IT is dead, we can do it all ourselves!" mantra coming from the iPhone-toting, Tweeting, Gmail-reading crowd today. But looking back, it's clear that there really are tectonic shifts created by the long-term applications of certain technologies, and I do believe we are on the cusp, or even in the early stages, of such a shift in the way that business applies technology. It's driven by a number of factors, certainly including those mentioned above, but that is really neither here nor there. What is important is that the role of CIO is becoming increasingly uncertain, and in places even irrelevant, and unfortunately this is happening with the uncomprehending aid of CIOs themselves.

Gartner puts it this way:

...many executives understand that what follows probably won’t be just another turn of the business cycle. This new period will see a restructuring of the economic order. Some are calling it the “new normal,” marked by persistent uncertainty, tighter credit, lower consumer spending, and greater government involvement in business.

For executives who run major IT organizations, the implications are clear: they will have to make the IT function dramatically more productive, use IT more effectively to meet larger company goals, and embrace disruptive technologies that will shape the new economic terrain.

The implications, however, seem to be anything but clear in many IT organizations. The stories from the ranks continue to tell of IT executives arbitrarily cutting costs without redesigning services, stomping out disruptive technologies at every turn, and generally hunkering down to wait for the return of their expansive budgets, at which time they no doubt hope to pick up right where they left off, funding massive upgrade projects of legacy systems and defining new Acceptable Use Policies to hand down from on high.

The McKinsey article is a genuinely good read and I heartily recommend it, so I won't rehash all of their prescriptions for CIOs who wish to remain relevant. I will challenge a central thesis they seem to hold, which is that most of this pressure is economic and will continue to be so; or rather, I'll redefine what kind of economic pressure I think will actually be brought to bear. While their assertion that the global business climate will remain dim for an extended period, shrinking the available budget pool, I believe that regardless of the budget pool available, the fact is that companies, and CEOs, are beginning to understand that equivalent or better services can be delivered with today's technology for less money than the CIO has historically represented. Moreover, increasingly technology-aware staff are demanding performance from corporate systems that exceeds the delivery capacity of traditional in-house services, based on their own experiences with consumer SaaS-driven solutions. If your budget allocation should suddenly skyrocket tomorrow, those pressures aren't going to go away.

It's left to the CIO not to resist and attempt to stonewall on these factors, but to get out ahead of the curve, by envisioning how they can be used to make his or her organization more efficient and the overall business more productive. A frequent complaint I have heard from CIOs and IT managers is that much of what is being brought in from the outside has glitz and sex appeal but real little application to their existing problems. The challenge isn't to exile the inevitable, but to instead step back and see how it can be made to have application to existing problems.

Forrester's Nigel Fenwick captures exactly how this process needs to work in a recent post on CIOs and social media. Social media may or may not be your organization's flavor of the day, but that's beside the point; Fenwick asks how many CIOs see themselves as social evangelists, and I would expand that question by asking how many of you see yourselves as evangelists at all? And I don't mean in the geeky, "Hey, look at this cool new gadget!" sense, but rather in the "We should adopt technology X which will save us $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER a year; I've run the numbers, I know it's scary, but get on board!" sort of way. CIOs need to be bringing these technologies into the business before Joe Mailroom does, and certainly need to know enough to successfully defend or deny their applicability to the business.

The bad news is that I don't think there is any question over the long term that the role of the CIO as we know it is going to fade. Technology, despite what you may have heard, is just getting too easy. When the CEO can peck his credit card number into his browser and move the whole company to Gmail, there is just a much more limited need for an executive dedicated to translating the techno-babble for the board. The good news is that I think there is an even more important executive role opening up, possibly even with the same name, for people bright enough to know what sort of these technologies can be used successfully and how they can be integrated with the business. This requires aspirants to that job to function well in an area where CIOs, and IT departments, have traditionally languished: IT/Business alignment. But that's the new game in town. L2P, n00b.