That's the new buzzword, anyway; "new normal" meaning "still pretty crappy but you had better get used to it."

Not surprisingly, people are getting used to it, including both business and IT executives according to a recent McKinsey survey on the subject. CIOs have survived 2008/2009 by trimming past excesses from the system and promising new, cost-effective initiatives to boost business efficiency and keep the company competitive without increasing head-count. That, incidentally, came out on top of the IT capability wishlist in the survey. In a synergistic effort to achieve this state of affairs without breaking the bank, operations budgets will continue to suffer even as investments in efficiency initiatives are expected to increase. Either CIOs have been keeping some mad skillz under their hats all this time or some people are going to be extremely upset toward the end of 2010... if it was that easy to restructure to more efficient systems while chopping operations costs, what's taken so long already? Don't get me wrong, I think it's perfectly achievable, but did everyone really just simultaneously see the light here, or are they pitching the CEO only the arguments he or she wants to hear?

Whichever of these is the case, not clear whether these assertions are finding traction in executives offices. Non-IT execs have improved their opinion of IT's ability to deliver basic services, but marks for project performance continues to lag (as well it might, considering the continuing abysmal on-time/on-budget performance of almost half of all IT projects). IT executive outlooks, on the other hand, have taken a healthy dive with respect to their own capabilities. Whether as a result of diminishing budgets or external threats, fewer than half find their own performance "very satisfactory."

This speaks well of the industry and may well indicate that CIOs are staying on the rails as their position corners from a defensive, risk-averse role to a more innovative, business-oriented job. Whatever the state of underlying budgets or technologies, everyone seems to be keeping their eye on the ball, with two-thirds of respondents still focused on IT/business alignment. If that continues to be the case through 2010, we may be looking at a world that still has some use for CIOs after all.