by Robert N. Charette

If CIOs want to survive into the future, they will need to think of their job in terms of reducing the information, control, and/or time-related risks of their organization's customers, and wherever necessary, to remind senior management that this is their primary job as well.

Luckily for CIOs, this is likely to happen naturally. Cutter Fellow Steven Andriole persuasively argues that technology has been "commoditized, consumerized -- and [has] left the building," as he cleverly states it. In other words, information that used to be under the purview of corporations and governments has been democratized, and as a result, consumers are now able to manage the root causes of their risks better than ever before without the need of corporations or governments. Overcoming the lack of information to make intelligent risk decisions, for instance, is much easier today because of the Internet and, more recently, the growth of social groups.

This means that corporations everywhere will need to work harder than ever to achieve Drucker's objective of creating a customer. They will have to provide much more value-added information to customers and/or focus their efforts on reducing their customers' control- or time-driven risks. Profit -- which, remember, is the payment for mitigating a customer's risks -- is going to be increasingly difficult to generate.

"Back to the Future: The Future Role of the CIO," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1