These 3 personalities encompass what Atti Riazi, CIO of the NYCHA (and former CIO of Ogilvy World Wide, as well as member of CIOs without borders) describes as her vision of the enlightened IT leader. (Politics in IT Organizations: The silent killer, CIO Talk Radio. August 23, 2010 18:30 – 18:44). …An interesting combination. These 3 historic personages as a definition of a CIO cover an intriguing and broad range of leadership skills: - wartime negotiator and political champion, saint with a mission to save the world, and a focused attacker of the enemy, be that enemy a competitor or a problem. 

The history describing the role that CIOs played in establishing technology as a business tool at the start of the 21^st century is still being written, with a blank page for the ending. What will be written? Will the role become a footnote explaining an obsolete acronym? Will the role atomize into multiple IT managers for each one of multiple business units? Or, will there be a big bang and rebirth into some new business role/ hybrid business-technology leader?

40 years ago, there were public phone booths dotting the landscape for anyone on the move. Then suddenly, phones lost those physical tethers and morphed. Recently, an engineer accidently forgot his top secret next gen iPhone prototype at a public place, allowing news of its new features to be leaked to the press. It’s the ever expanding array of features that allow these smart phones to transcend their humble heritage as simple voice carriers. Mobile phones are true technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we live and do business.  

What’s not to love about bargains… for example, getting more IT at a lower cost!  There are a plethora of new technologies that seem to offer the tantalizing but risky promise of IT bargains to be had.  These new delivery models signal a paradigm shift from IT constructing to IT acquiring and deploying (Sunoco CIO Peter Whatnell, The new delivery models and the economics of IT, August 4^, 2010: 8:12 to 8:51) IT is now in a difficult place, responsible for providing and utilizing services to help business that may be delivered in environments over which it has little control. There are serious issues at stake, including security risks, irretrievability/retrievability of data from the cloud, and tradeoffs. So what does it take to get IT and business to dance together in sync?

Every day we take for granted things like voice mail, email, chat, and texting, but it might be interesting if we could get into the “Wayback Machine” with Mr. Peabody, and go back to that one crucial moment long ago at some corporate board meeting, when (theoretically at least) some management executive might have asked, ‘Well, Mr./Ms.  CIO, give the board an estimate of the ROI for this email thing you’re proposing. What productivity does it offer? What kind of return can we expect? What are the negatives? What could it cost us, if it’s a flop?’

Traditionally, business people expected IT to be like the wizard behind the curtain, silently keeping the Emerald City running while they dealt with customers. Over time, the curtain has been yanked open exposing IT as controlling the strategic mojo needed to help business compete as well as influence customer retention.  So, how does an IT leader strut his IT’s strategic stuff and gain TRUE BLUE loyalty?   One strategy used by Kevin Larson, CIO of AAR Corporation, was to develop his IT team as a strategic differentiator, working actively to put solutions in place. For one thing, his IT specializes in rapid deployment with lots of hand holding. Soundclip - 01

If the versatilist does everything, the competitive IT leader strives to do it better than others, while the chameleon fits in anywhere. Then there are the flash-in-the-pan celebrities, with some one special achievement enshrined in his or her bio. But do all these CIOs retain certain core skills in common, that will guarantee success, repeatedly, anywhere he or she goes? And are these core traits innate, or can a CIO acquire any core traits he or she lacks?

“Homo Corporatus” was basing his/her business decisions on gut feel long before computers existed. Winging it and winning was the highest validation of the savvy business leader.  But now, a new age has dawned.  Can tech leaders use BI wizardry to beat, or at least better Homo Corporatus’ decision making? Just how intelligent is BI?

A rainmaker is someone who excels at bringing in business. While not a person, cloud computing has certainly seeded lots of new IT service providers looking for a piece of the action, not only externally, but internally. Outsourcing some services can be efficient but that also means there is less control over data, while keeping everything internal can require significant investment and involve risks. So ultimately, the real question comes down to what the future shape of private cloud computing will be.

Just how alien is the business side of an organization to the IT workers running things, and vice versa? Traditionally we think of IT guys as geeks who are focused on their own narrow little world. Still, any worker could help watch to see that little things which might have slipped by someone on the business side are caught before they create a problem. But is it reasonable to expect those same  IT workers, who are often heavily involved in tasks strategic to running the business, and who may need to focus fully on the IT tasks at hand, to also keep an eye on customers, competitors, and the business environment, as if they were the guys wearing the business suits?