In a warning that gets straight to the point, Gartner Inc. claims CIOs who don’t adapt to continuing budgetary and performance pressures risk losing their jobs.
Job security no longer exists in a business climate that is all about stagnant or shrinking budgets.
Gartner claims the pressure to perform has made the CIO title “the most difficult and demanding of all management roles.”
And the research doesn’t get any better. With outsourcing and changing work practices taking hold in mature technology markets like Australia and the U.S., it is these markets that will suffer drastic job losses over the next few years.
One in 10 vendor-based jobs will move to “emerging markets” and one in 20 will shift to the end-user side, according to the research.
Gartner EXP (Executive Programs) research director Andrew Rowsell-Jones said today’s CIO was a “dying breed” which would not survive with technical competencies alone; a CIO would also need business and behavioral expertise.
Rowsell-Jones pinpointed key responsibilities for CIOs of the future as IT leadership, architecture development, business enhancement, technology advancement and vendor management.
Gartner EXP vice-president Jose Ruggero believes the CIO role is being reinvented.
“The best CIOs will shift their focus towards greater governance and engagement with the business,” he said.
“Organizations demand that the CIO of today and tomorrow is a jack of all trades; an executive that leads like a CEO, analyzes like a CFO and executes like a COO leaving the CIO with the hardest job in an enterprise.”
The most savvy CIOs were those who could balance their roles as the high-profile executive working on the demand side with business, and deliver value in the IT world where services had become more transaction-based, with standardized and packaged IT products.
Gartner described companies embodying this shift in the IT business environment as ‘IS Lite’ organizations, which are typically process-based, engage in outsourcing, have centers of excellence and have established application development within the business.
In a Gartner EXP global survey of 151 CIOs, 80 percent said their organization showed at least one of these trends.