Role of New CIO - Gartner

Gartner analysts told an audience of more than 7,000 IT leaders, at the Gartner Symposium-2010 in Orlando:  “Firms now have different expectations of their CIO!”

"This new type of CIO won't ask first what the implementation cost is, or whether something complies with the architecture, but whether it's good for the organization," "They will train their teams to think like a business executive, asking first 'is this valuable?', and only then asking 'how can we make this work?'

The new CIO and their team will be experimenting with new ideas, working with product development, marketing and public relations to come up with ways of delivering more value directly to the external customer.

Power of Unprecedented Choice
CIOs might not recognize choice in action, when what they feel is loss of control - IT losing control of the infrastructure, control of applications, and control of devices. IT leaders should rethink whether it's really a loss of control, or whether it is choice in action.

The Wild Open World
People leave a trail of what they've done online, leaving a rich body of information about their interests, intentions and activities. The data, much of it unstructured, contains nuggets of wisdom buried in various formats such as videos, podcasts, and blogs.

Shift from Output to Outcome
For IT, outputs are measured in terms of projects completed, budget run-rate, servers deployed, network uptime, etc.

Outputs are proxies for cost and risk. Cost is important, but it is only one direction of a CIO's compass. In contrast, by focusing on outcomes, CIOs will also address value and innovation.

Cheers