With the increased adoption of IT in enterprises the role of CIO has gained significance. In this blog I would want to share my thoughts on the future of this role and in particular the IT Manager, equivalent of a CIO for small businesses.
With Cloud computing IT has taken a fundamental change. There is a paradigm shift in how both hardware and software will be consumed by businesses in future. This is due to two innovations one in technology (Cloud Computing) and one in Business model (SAAS). In 2009 both these paradigms came together providing a fundamentally different way for delivering IT to businesses. So before we proceed let us quickly describe the two briefly:
Cloud Computing: A superior and cost effective way for delivering hardware to businesses
SAAS: A great business model for just-in-time consumption of software and not over provisioning.
The role of the IT manager apart form managing the "IT budgets" was to:
* ensure the uptime of all the applications
* capturing requirements for new needs from businesses and decide the appropriate application to buy or build
With the advent of these new cloud applications the businesses can move their operations online leaving the task of managing the applications to the SAAS providers. More importantly the line or business managers can now decide themselves which applications would best suit their work without the need to understand any technology intricacies and the need for any intermediaries like the IT manager.
So what will be role of the IT manager? I see a very limited role in smaller organizations and for larger organizations where investments have been made it would be mostly a maintenance role.
Would like to hear your views on this role and other impacts this new online world could cause to the existing IT setups and paradigms.
