Death of the CIO

Over the last thirty years I have read the orbituaries of many IT professions.

I cannot count the number of times that I have read of the death of the programmer as some new type of tool was supposed to make everything so easy that programmers would soon die out. 4GLs (or Fourth Generation Languages were supposed to do it in the early eighties, Workflow in the nineties and more recently rules engines). Each time the promoted nemesis has turned out to be more difficult to use than its promoters sales pitches would have you believe. Each time some other technological progression or change has introduced new complexities which need detailed technical knowledge. Always there have been things that these tools can not do, requiring specialist programmers to address short commings.

Likewise, the analyst was supposed to be killed by RAD and then Agile developers, yet we need them even more than ever.

Architect, too have been in the line of fire. At the end of the nineties, as the first internet boom took hold, we were told that there was no time for strategy and we were advised to stop worrying about architecture. Then in the late noughties the current fad for enterprise architecture took off again. So it was not a surprise that I was invited to a debate about "Whether Agile is killing the Architect" a few months ago. Everything is cyclic and Agile only really works well when the overall architecture is pre-planned, unless of course the solution is so trivial that it does not matter.

So it is no surprise then that we often see pundits trying to stir the pot with assertions that the CIO will die out. The most recent justification being that Chief Marketting Officers have stolen the "Chief Digital Officer" crown.

Interestingly enough, a recent global survey run jointly by a well know recruitment agency in partnership with a big 4 consultancy, showed that there is a resurgence of CIO roles here with an increasing proportion of them taking on the role of Chief Digital Officer.

This is unsurprising really, given the range of skills needed to be an effective CIO. They are quite different to those required to be a Chief Marketing Officer and what we are really witnessing is the end of another fad, as the CIO's role adjusts to deal with the new opportunities and challenges involved to shifting to a digital business agenda.