RSSIf the CIO is going to disappear, when is that happening exactly?
For nearly three years I've been going on about the dangers that consumerization and outsourcing to the CIO and the IT department without seeing much materialize in the market either in terms of a reasoned response or a significant impact. With budgets cut and resources constrained, IT departments and CIOs have pretty much soldiered on with the same paradigms in place under which they entered the profession and encountered the recent recession. Some adaptations have been made in some places, but none of the wholesale changes forecast by myself or others have really come to pass.
This hasn't prevented any of us from changing our tune; for my part, the forces involved seem clear, and the failure of CIOs to react with long-term vision has not done anything to deflect them. The most recent entry in this growing chorus comes from the Corporate Executive Board, which has released a report entitled "The Future of Corporate IT" which doesn't see much in the way of a traditional IT department involved at all.
The CEB looks at many of those same forces (increasing pressures for IT/business alignment, lower technology costs, and the broad availability of outside services) and comes to the bold conclusion that in five years, IT departments will shrink to a quarter their current size.
The report explores the duplication of functional roles across organizations and examines how an overall economic pressure to reduce this inefficiency will accelerate other factors reducing the size and autonomy of the IT department.
This all emphasizes that IT is an operational role, not an accounting one, in the modern business. Yet it seems that all the time spent railing against the common organizational structure placing IT beneath the CFO may be moot, in that IT may not continue to exist as a distinct role under any particular executive branch in the near future. CEB envisions IT embedded into existing business units, reducing a duplication of functions while at the same time improving alignment dramatically, so the overall job loss in Information Technology may not be too dramatic (though it's hard to imagine that outsourcing and consolidating functions will not result in some significant reductions), but it leaves the CIO presiding over a pretty empty department, unless he or she can start paving the way for a more strategic role now.
If anything, I think CEB undershoots on the potential for IT disintegration because they fail to account for the almost willful disregard of these factors and forces by CIOs and others in IT leadership functions. If there is anything that will accelerate their demise, it is ignoring the trends that militate for it.
Oddly, though they predict a diminution of IT, their identified "Key Intermediate Steps" to the shift showcase the ineffective traditional IT department responses to those forces.
- Information Architecture
- ITIL v3
- Private Clouds
- New IT-Business Divisions of Labor
- Agile Development
ITIL, Information architecture, and the dreadful nonsense of "Private Clouds" are all movements that traditional IT proponents have clung to as a means of retaining their positions in the organization. Agile Development and new IT/Business divisions of labor, the last two steps, have a little more credence, although I don't believe they go far enough; agile needs to spread further than development, which is a relatively small part of the IT organization in most companies.
This is a small oversight, because otherwise they have done an excellent job of looking at the conventional wisdom responses and pointing out what is missing.
Still, given all this excellent information and analysis, joining other research in that vein by Bob Evans and others, why aren't we seeing more disintegration in IT already? Evans presents some compelling evidence that CIOs are already diminishing in number and influence, echoing previous surveys showing that the independence of the CIO peaked and began to recede sometime in 2007. But predicting a 75% reduction in IT department headcount in five years is a much bolder claim, and a hard one to envision if, as we all hope, that period also includes a significant recovery from the recession. All the bad habits CIOs have acquired are reinforced during times of expansion; if businesses didn't get the clue during the recession itself, what motivations will they have when they are spinning back up and revenues are good?
I'm not sure what the answer is to that, if not "nothing will change until the next recession" but I remain convinced that the ultimate trajectory of the corporate IT department and the CIO is downward unless they can look ahead and present a third option to boards and CEOs.
