In my last post I covered some major trends that are shaping the role of the CIO. To recap, the world is becoming software-defined. Everything is running on software. Secondly, the customer is changing and therefore the CIO must change. Because of these two major trends, I see eight factors that are driving the evolution of the CIO.
Let's take a look at some of the changes I believe will impact the CIO specifically and IT professionals in general.
Globalization
As I closed with in my last post, the physical markets are changing. You customer no longer lives where you live. Even if you're lucky enough to live in one of the emerging markets, each one alone only accounts for less than 10% of the opportunity, which means that more than ever we all will be expected to offer great products to customers around the globe, around the clock and in a multitude of languages. If you don't have an Internationalization (I18N) strategy now, get working on it!
Mobility
It's also safe to assume that no matter what demographic you're chasing, they will be connected almost exclusively via mobile devices. Yes, perhaps laptops in the developed world, but increasingly you'll have to develop your accessibility strategy assuming that your customers and employees will be using a combination of "feature" (basic) phones, smartphones and tablets. And of course they will all come from an increasingly bewildering array of device manufacturers and operating systems. So finding tools that allow you to manage that experience in a heterogeneous, dispersed world will be critical.
Applications
Smartphones and devices aren't the only areas where "apps" will make their presence felt. Automation apps built into wearable computers, domestic appliances, cars, light-industrial robotics and buildings will redefine every aspect of our lives, requiring every product manager/designer/support technician to become software savvy. Managing change and defects will become even more important when it's a life-or-death situation.
The problem for every product manager and CIO is that we'll be expected to deliver more applications faster—up to 30x more releases per app/per year than we already crank out today! So we'll have to re-engineer the development process accordingly to take the "command and control" model out and move to a more collaborative process. It will use shared metrics and highly synchronised automation to remove the friction and waste that's generated using current processes which reinforce an adversarial relationship between developers, QA, security and operations.
Data
But the apps aren't enough. Despite having mastered structured data over the past 40 years, the massive scale of machine data and unstructured human information represents both a huge opportunity and challenge to creating actionable insights. Instead of over specialising and knowing more-and-more about less-and-less, we'll use cross-disciplinary teams to find connections between structured business data and unstructured customer and social data, leading to breakthrough opportunities for product development, marketing and monetisation.
Connected Intelligence
With so much technology widely available, corporate IT will no longer be the sole source of high technology. We're already past the point where most people in the developed world rely on corporate to provide a PC or smartphone, the next phase will see most of us choosing our own application and cloud services to help us work more effectively. Your role shifts to empowering through great design and nimble, reusable platforms that make your enterprise services and data available to everyone.
This has the potential to lead to a fragmentation of corporate data and impact governance. But, instead of trying to control, I believe CIOs will seek to partner with business users to help them find the right service at the right time that conform to data portability and security standards that enable the kind of Connected Intelligence we need to find insights. This must be done without bogging down customers and staff with the burden of a centrally planned master architecture. Because even with all that choice, I believe the CIO will still be expected to shield the end-users from the complexity of managing a wide array of service providers.
Security
Sadly, if it's valuable to you, it's probably valuable to someone else. Active email addresses trade hands within the spammer community for hundreds of dollars, credit cards for thousands and, I imagine, the plans to the next secret military gear, for millions. And when they can all be stolen by the millions, that's big money, the kind of money that attracts professional crime rings. The CIO of the future will steal a page from the playbook of the criminal and use information sharing networks to detect early warnings of new patterns of attack, comprised partner networks and defensive tactics. The arms race to protect the data centre and the network will continue.
Power and Electricity
And it's likely to be a very different data centre too. Today we face challenges simply finding enough power in crowded cities such as London just to feed the machines we have and we waste countless energy simply keeping archival material rotating on disks, even though it's only accessed infrequently. The data centre of 2020 is likely to be completely transformed with the exception of a few legacy machines stubbornly whirring away in the corner. Instead of electricity, we'll use photonics interconnected at the semiconductor and "bus" level to reduce the amount of waste heat and speed up communications 2-3 times more than the fastest speeds we have available today. Instead spinning hard disk platters we’ll move to faster flash, faster core-memory to the CPU with no latency because there will be only one type of memory. The memristor will allow us to supplant the workarounds of tiered storage with one uniform architecture saving time, space and energy.
Resources and personnel
Another area of waste is throwing too many people at the problem to keep it all running—something I expect cloud services will only worsen. And while the "operator to infrastructure" management ratio has improved in leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, we will need significant improvements to deal with the sheer number of devices and data we will need to manage. We can't continue to bombard people with bursts of alerts and actions - some urgent, others not. Instead we'll use intelligent triage technology to space them over the day to ensure that we avoid creating peaks and troughs of activity and creating even more bottlenecks for limited talent.
Great talent will continue to be scare.That shortage of talent will force us to look further afield for new sources of skills—Indonesia, Russia, China and India will produce 400% more graduates than the US, which will require us to get better at finding ways to identify the right colleges, candidates and skills and to figure out what it takes to attract and retain talent from a completely different culture.
How do we get there?
With all of this change, we should expect that even our own skills will need to change. Research shows that we can expect the continuation of a progressive shift from being the "geeks in the glasshouse" to an integral part of business strategy and capabilities. Just like our CEOs and leaders, we're going to need to go back to school on a diverse array of topics including design, new development methodologies, systems integration, risk and governance and even commercial models.
It might seem daunting, but I think the CIO of 2020 will be one of the most challenging and rewarding roles on the planet.
