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Last week during a Web seminar, Salesforce.com’s Director of Platform Research
Peter Coffee projected that the day may soon arrive when CIOs spend most of their
time focusing on supervising business processes and less and less dealing with technology.
This certainly isn’t a new notion. The late Michael Hammer, who is generally viewed
as the driving force behind the business process revolution, often said that CIOs
will necessarily morph into chief process officers (CPOs) or chief process and innovation officers (CPIOs). What makes this prediction more salient today is the advent of cloud computing, the move to more service oriented architecture and the significant uptick in outsourcing apps development and IT infrastructure.
Today CIOs, in many instances, still have to focus on upping productivity and improving ROI but are no longer up to their elbows in running the IT engine.Instead, they’re supervising the providers who operate their technology.
In theory, at least, that leaves the CIO time to focus on enhancing business processes,
to be innovative, blend IT seamlessly into the business and improve and sreamline
business processes. Author Peter Hinssen writes about this transition in his latest
book, Business/IT Fusion. And some vendors have picked up on this theme as well.
Last fall, for instance, at a SAP user group in the Netherlands the topic of the day
was: “Will the CIO be replaced by the Chief Processing Officer?"
It’s unlikely that some BPO is going to suddenly emerge to replace the CIO. More
realistically the CIO, who has an overview of all the enterprise’s IT-driven business
processes, and can determine and articulate how SaaS, cloud and the like can
improve those processes, will evolve into the role.
If not….well you know the answer to that "do or die" question.
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