In 2020 the CIO was supposed to become extinct ...

In the corporate world for a long time, 2020 was the milestone year for which everyone without exception wanted to predict the future. Vision 2020 sounded great with its connotations around the ocular version as vision 2020 is supposed to be the best vision anyone can have. While it was like a cliché, we all played the game and made predictions – wild and irrational in some cases, and the world waited with abated breath to reality as it would unfold when 2020 came around. I too indulged in forecasting the role of the CIO (my favorite subject for a long time) in the year 2020 (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/cio-2020-dead-surviving-thriving-arun-gupta/).

But forces beyond our control (the jury is still out on that one - manmade or nature) decided that all the plans and postulations of men wise and foolish came to naught. The pandemic changed the world – the way it works, plays, lives life and interacts with each other. Organizations scurried to enable the workforce with technology outside the workplace to keep the people productive, the products and services available as required, and finally engage with their business customers and individual consumers digitally for their continued relevance and survival.

My hypothesis in 2015 on the role of the CIO created 3 buckets: the first comprising of the real CIOs (1-5%) who will continue to make a difference to their company, industry and world at large, the second burgeoning middle (50-70%) from which some of who will expand the crème taking it to double digits, and finally from the bottom a reasonable number will float into the middle thus creating an equilibrium around the equator (metaphorically speaking). The extinction of the role was never a possibility in my mind its growing prominence never in doubt.

Reality is that the CIO was thrust into prominence with the need for technology solutions to keep going in a distributed world. Almost every CIO that I know of rose to the occasion, creating capacity and leveraging the existing to enable the enterprise. With offices shutting down and staff working remotely, the crisis challenged the IT team to manage the distributed end user infrastructure, connectivity, security and productivity while reducing costs – a necessity with the adverse impact to revenue and profitability.

Between the years 2015 to 2020, the CIO continued the onward and upward march with various technology led interventions and partnership with startups to keep pushing the innovation agenda. The rise of digital born companies across industries and geographies has disrupted many established business models resulting in technology investments to gain back lost market share. The CDO role survived in a few organizations though in most cases it folded into the IT leader to keep the digital transformation going, accelerated by the pandemic.

In the last 12 months, the discussion and debate on the continuity, relevance or future of the CIO role appears to have been buried for now. Across the buckets defined above, everyone ramped up their technology offerings to ensure that all stakeholders are able to connect and work together though with varying degrees of success to begin with and then catching up with the demand. The journey towards a digital enterprise accelerated with the new abnormal way of working is in some cases losing steam. It is imperative for the leadership teams to stay focused.

The question that comes to my mind now is, 5 years from today, what will happen to the CIO in 2025? How will the responsibility grow or change? Most of the first generation CIOs would have exited by then, superannuated and retired. The new breed is a lot more vocal and articulate, not necessarily having grown bottom up in a technical role. They have a different level of confidence and willingness to take risks that has helped them as well as their organizations the ability to embrace technology quicker than before.

I believe that in 2025 and beyond the CIO will continue to be the shepherd of technology and would be an equal on the management table with a holistic view of the business. S/he will be a co-owner of parts of the business and be responsible for at least one more function beyond IT. The crème would have grown with the flattening of the middle and slimming of the laggards. IT teams would include subject matter experts across business horizontals – finance, supply chain, human resources, etc. The CIO will be a candidate for lateral roles as much as others and the number of CEOs emerging from IT will keep growing !

Amen!