Five Ways the CIO Role Changes in the Cloud
By Laton McCartney, Editor at CIOZone
It’s too early to gauge the full impact that cloud computing will have on the responsibilities and priorities of chief information officers, but some changes are already evident.
Clearly, CIOs will serve as the change agents as the cloud becomes more pervasive through the enterprise.
They’ll likely need to educate fellow C-level executives from the CEO and CFO on down as to how cloud computing can benefit the organization - and where it may fall short or create security problems.
Likely it will be up to the IT chief to act as a relationship and portfolio manager in negotiating with cloud service providers and monitoring their performance.
And that’s just for starters. Here are five ways the cloud could alter the CIO position:
An Opportunity to Be Heroes
“Cloud presents the biggest opportunity since the onset of the client/server era for CIOs to actively reduce complexity and the resulting operational cost,” says Juergen Urbanski, managing director of research firm TechAlpha.
Urbanski sees two trends merging with the utilization of cloud computing.
“On the business side, the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model places the burden of complexity on the service provider and hence seems to align incentives much better,” he says.
“On the technical side, developments such as virtualization, unified computing, availability of open-source management software, multi-tenancy … make the shared hosting economics work to enable service providers to address their own complexity through standardization and automation in a way that was not possible in the old dedicated hosting days.”
A Shift in Focus
The CIO will be expected to shift focus from operational excellence in IT delivery to orchestrating alignment of internal and external resource pools with business needs, according to TechAlpha’s Urbanski.
CIOs will spend more time defining capabilities that can deliver business value (including innovation), and selecting, monitoring and managing multiple vendors. Their performance will not be measured by the size of their IT budget, but the effectiveness of IT in supporting business functions.
Collaborators, Not Technology Czars
In the traditional hierarchy, CIOs run a top-down organization supervising the IT infrastructure framework.
However, in an increasingly virtualized enterprise they’ll be interacting across functions with non-IT managers to come up with effective, innovative business solutions.
As Jim Champy, chairman of consulting for Perot Systems, noted at a recent CIO Symposium at MIT:
“CIOs should participate in innovation around the company’s business model, which goes beyond contributions just to product, services and operations. Managing infrastructure is worthless if the business fails.”
Setting Revenue Goals
With cloud computing, CIOs can translate business goals into application and architecture goals. That means they can set revenue goals rather than cost management objectives.
Return on investment of the application portfolio is one of the key metrics here, and this is an area in which cloud computing can have a direct and pronounced impact.
Manage Resistance, Overcome Inertia
Not everyone in the enterprise is eager to embrace the cloud.
Security is a real show-stopper, and for the technology to be accepted CIOs have to ensure that it’s safe — and persuade senior management that’s the case.
At the same time, IT staffers may feel threatened. “One of the biggest barriers will be resistance from IT staff who want clouds to fail since their silo and jobs would be losing power,” says TechWeb’s Urbanski.
“Then, you have to break the organizational inertia of the server huggers. In the enterprise you add about three IT people for every 100 servers, while Amazon presumably can add thousands of servers without incremental staff.”
Laton McCartney is a former editor-in-chief of InformationWeek. He has also been a top editor at several Ziff Davis publications, including Smart Partner. Laton has written for The Washington Post, Fortune and other national publications. He also the author of a number of books, including the best-seller “Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story.” His latest, “The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country“, will be published in February by Random House.
CIOZone.com is the first of its kind online meeting place for CIOs. It is built upon the foundation of social networking and combines user generated content and expert editorial together around an open source platform.
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Filed under: Breach, CIOZone, Cloud computing, D&O Liability, FEATURE ARTICLE, Financial, Insider Threat, Laton McCartney, Sarbanes-Oxley, Uncategorized, due diligence, hackers, identity-theft, malware, national security, privacy, virtualization
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