Recently, during one of
my management classes, the lecturer said something very shocking. He predicted
that in the next five years, most companies will not need a CIO. In fact, he
joked about it and said it might stand for “Career Is Over”. In his view, majority
of the youth are techno savvy and as they grow to the CXO level, there will be
no need to demystify technology since it will be inherent to them. They will
know what technology to use when and where in order to achieve the company’s
strategy. I belong to the school of thought that feels that the IT department
has been long marginalized, usually place under the care of the CFO. The two
are acutely antagonistic; one is out to save money while the other is out to
spend it on technology. Given, sometimes the spendthrift IT department needs to
be controlled, looking for the latest high end appliances for data storage,
security, and unified communications. Before I could criticize him, I paused
and remembered that 10 years ago, there were colleges in our neighbourhoods
teaching courses in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Access. Now they are
extinct, there are needed any more. A child will simply log into a laptop or a
smart device, go to Facebook and start chatting. To him or her, typing in any
application is inherent, just like walking. Get the picture?
There is another
growing but worrying trend; outsourcing. IT and cloud services are becoming
easier to adopt. As standards and policies continue to be defined, small and
medium companies-in which most companies in Kenya fall in- will find it easier
to deploy leaving out the need for experts in the organization. For instance,
when a company decides to move to Google Mail or Office 365, do they need the
guidance of a CIO? Maybe they don’t. What if a company decided to use Skype for
Business for communication or Salesforce.com for sales funnel management? May
they don’t? Location of a server running and enterprise application is no
longer important, whether on private, public, or hybrid cloud; on a virtualized
machine on virtualized storage, over a virtualized network and so on. The
important factors are determined by cost, service-level agreements and
regulatory requirements. These are decisions can be made without a technical
expert in the room, especially where time and cost are of essence. Outsourcing
is a game changer, given the large economy of scale achieved by centralized purchasing;
the costs are lower. The effect of this is better response time, governance,
security, redundancy isolation, and other operational requirements. The fixed
costs will are shared across a broader base, lowering them making them
variable.
Traditionally, the CIO has not been a breeding
ground for upcoming CEOs. For CIOs to survive, they must evolve. Most
organizations see a CIO as a cost center spending projected profits thus
impacting the bottom line. Today’s CIO, more than ever, must be strategic;
mapping the value of technology across different disciplines in an
organization. All companies heavily rely on technology to be ahead of
competition. Consumers demand the use of technology to ease their purchase and
for a seamless experience. There is no alternative. CIOs must plan to grow to
be CEOs. Learn how to evaluate and analyse financial statement, understand the
mechanics of business operations, gain hands on experience on other areas of
the business and acquire customer service skills. In other words, CIOs need to
move out of their comfort zones. Historically, CIOs have grown in IT
departments, often from programmer or network administrator to the top of the
IT division, without much time spent in other functions in the company. This
makes them narrow minded and lack a certain perspective of the business. Most
often than not, they do not interact with external customers and may not
understand the challenges of the market they are in. This is comparison to COOs
for instance, who have to understand the end to end processes of an
organization. As other members of the executive board become more empowered
technology wise, the CIO may be irrelevant.
