Whither the CIO

I started this post back in early August and it got lost in the draft folder.  So, while the referenced post is now a bit dated, the topic certainly isn't any less timely.

In a post on Brian Gillooly's CIO Nation Blog, Gregor Bailor, recently CIO at Capital One, said: As to where the CIO role goes... The use of IT is moving up the value chain and needs to be a part of "Business Design and Fulfillment" rather than "IT". This means that Operations and Technology groups are going to merge more. In addition, the e-commerce and customer interactions are so technology enabled now that they too need to be closely linked with IT strategy and process design. To this end, the new CIO role here will incorporate Enterprise Customer Management (all customer touch points and data), management of all Internet activities, Enterprise Process Engineering as well as all typical CIO functions."

A couple of thoughts came to mind while mulling this over and, since this is my blog, I figured I'd share them.

1. I generally agree with Gregor's perspective.  Having run both Content Operations and IT for Getty Images, I have some recent experience with just this kind of blended role. I was fortunate to have really superb leaders working for me which gave me the freedom to look down the road a bit to develop strategy and encourage taking more risks to gain more innovative solutions.  The Content Ops groups were heavily dependent on tools created by IT to really move the needle and I think it helped that both functions were aligned in one organization.  The teams were able to make process and quality improvements that were in some cases measured in an order of magnitude kind of way.
2. There are clearly going to be cases where the CIO's role is best filled by a focus on partnering with other functional leaders who are specialists in their fields rather than ownership.  I do think that the days where the CIO could "get away with" only taking responsibility for delivering a system to spec are very much in the past.  Partnering means not just sharing budget and sponsorship but should include being on the hook to deliver results as well. 
3. The days where successful companies could push IT underneath CFO or Chief Administrative Officer or somewhere else on the SG&A side of the business are gone.  Those companies still operating that way are unlikely to be leaders in their sectors as more and more customers expect that effective, customer-focused technology is part of the delivery of goods and services. 

It used to be that we argued about whether the CIO role was going to go away, subsumed into every functional organization because it was so important.  We seem to be headed the other way, to where the CIO role continues to be elevated in importance to the success of businesses. Perhaps it's the seperate COO role that's going away.....

Or is that just CIO daydreams??