Larry Dignan and Jason Perlow have been covering Gartner's Emerging Technologies conference in Las Vegas for the past week or so and have turned in some posts worth reading. They're all linked from this one covering Gartner analyst Mark McDonald's ra-ra presentation on business alignment and the potential of IT innovation to affect business. As it happens, that's the one I am interested in talking about, although they are all excellent coverage of the event (why don't I ever get sent to these things?).

Dignan and Perlow capture my sentiment right off the bat: "The room was packed for yet another talk of business alignment, changing strategies and tips on how to connect with what the enterprise wants. Hasn't this song and dance been going on for 20 years?" If you don't understand by now that IT needs to support the business and haven't figured out some strategies for doing so, you're in the wrong line of work, folks. But despite the fact that it's an old message, it remains important, and too few CIOs are able to break out of their existing patterns of operation to seize on it.

There is a sort of inertia in any major endeavour which I think applies here, in that few people want to risk rocking the boat and looking bad. Although legacy support and operations issues weight IT departments down, they are known quantities and CIOs and staff alike have their measure and are comfortable with them. Newer technologies and approaches to traditional problems are percieved as being riskier, not just or particularly because they are unproven, but because if they become proven, they stand to diminish the importance of the IT department. SaaS, outsourcing, and BPM initiatives are places where the CIO can score wins, but they also move IT responsibility away from IT. They win because they merge technology better with the rest of the business, but they threaten the IT department by that same token. It takes an exceptional CIO not just to face this issue with confidence but to successfully transition to those new ways of doing business at the same time.