Advice for CIOs facing commoditized IT

The CIO position seems to be one of perennially high turnover, and dramatic changes in enterprise IT only appear to be exacerbating the trend. According to Phil Garland at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the evolution underway in enterprise IT is tantamount to the transition from mainframe to client/server computing--except that it will affect more people. 

The realm of IT is evolving from systems of integrated, proprietary infrastructure to sets of commoditized, standardized services, Garland says in a CIO Update article. "We have been struck by how many leading organizations have moved much of the infrastructure out the door; started moving away from highly managed, provisioned clients (PCs and mobile); and embraced smart SaaS usage at the business unit level," Garland says.

For CIOs who want to hold on to their jobs, Garland offers several pieces of advice: There is no room for IT outages, particularly in core operations; resisting web-based services or foregoing opportunities to reduce costs will not likely be appreciated; and, of course, it is imperative to remain mindful of keeping IT on track with business goals.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Garland's perspective tracks fairly closely with that of industry. Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer information infrastructure products at EMC, offered similar advice for CIOs over the past week. In a brief interview with Forbes, Gelsinger suggested that CIOs promote a standardized applications development process, transform themselves into business process partners and figure out how to manage the new environment with legacy gear still in place.

For more:
- see the CIO Update article
- see the Forbes article

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