Will IT Departments be useless in future?

When I first see the article from Peter Hinssen [1], I said once again that, this article supports my idea of new era in the IT management. The article [1] emphasize that CIO (Chief Information Officers) in most organizations are not performing their role as dealing with information. They rather deal with technology as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). IT departments stuck in their roles as technology supplier of mobile devices, laptops and windows. Many CIO limit themselves to supply employees with the laptops of MS windows, MS offices, Blackberries, I-phones, email and file sharing platforms with full technical support. Those technical support is sometimes reflected as "Satisfying of internal customers" by IT people and, even placed in the performance targets of those employees.


Very few are dealing with information. Those technology oriented so-called CIO are difficultly find a seat at the executive management tables. So they report more powerful executives such as CFO.

Recently we see rise of a new breed of CDO (Chief Digital Officer) This is the next generation of IT lead.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, as much as 25% of all organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) in their executive staff[2]. CDO will help organizations in driving the growth. They will expand the digital strategies of the organizations using web, mobile, social and local innovations [3]. Briefly CDO will not carry out technology but will carry out technology enabled innovation.They will be responsible of implementing "digital business strategy".This is not comparable what CIO is doing today.

Enabling technologies such as cloud computing will shape up this transformation in the organizations. Presumably, Cloud providers will offer and run the necessary technologies for any organization. Cloud provider's focus is to run the show in the following interest;

• Application or Software as a Service (SaaS) 
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The leftover to CDO is to shape up the future of the company with the correct digital strategy for growth and efficiency.

This will let the organizations to meet their customers in virtual world. It is clear that CDO profiles will be difficult to find. That is the challenge for the digital acumen and leaders to shape up the figure to meet the requirements of role and then to shape up the digital strategy of the organizations for growth.

For further details:
1- IT Departments Have Become Completely Useless
2- Chief Digital Officer' is the next hot executive title
3- The Rise of the Chief Digital Officer