I was thinking about the issues I will present at CeBIT Australia, and thought I would jot some thoughts down. The people at CeBIT thought it was interestign enough to publish in its entirety. How cool is that!? So here is the setup:
I keep hearing how cloud computing will kill the CIO. Articles, posts, and tweets claim “the CIO is dead,” done in by SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, and the increasing commoditization of IT resources. IT budgets are being cut (again!), but IT spending overall is going up, according to both IDC and Gartner.
IT is denied budget because the business units themselves are getting the budgets. Marketing is controlling social media, not IT. Sales are controlling Salesforce.com, not IT. The business units have the budget to establish mobile solutions using cloud services, not IT. Moreover, users are increasingly opting for free or low-cost solutions (such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, etc.) that are easy to use, play well with mobile devices, and meet their business requirements.
So some organizations are now wondering whether they even need a CIO, when users can just login to or download a solution, and leave the IT driving to their cloud service providers. Indeed, you could say it’s another nail in the CIO’s coffin every time a department chooses SaaS, every time people bring devices to work, every time teams go mobile courtesy of a smartphone store, or every time people hack the corporate network with help from an app vendor.
You could say that. But you would be wrong.
Why? Well, you need to read that over at CeBIT, in the ariticle Survivor: CIO Edition CeBIT Australia. And I will be at at CeBIT Australia’s Cloud Conference on 22 May 2012 presenting about how Cloud is transforming the CIO into the Chief Innovation Officer.