ATLANTA--When CIOs from around the country met at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center last week for the annual gathering of the Society for Information Management (SIM), cloud computing was high on the discussion agenda. But for many CIOs, discussing cloud computing is about as far as they really want to go with the technology right now.

"Everybody wants to know, what is it, can we use it, is it secure, is it going to save us millions?" Pat Coffey, chair of the SIM board of directors, told me when we sat down together toward the end of the conference. "We're all trying to learn about it to make sure we don't miss it. But if I try to get too far ahead of it, I'm going to get burned. It's a big game of chicken."

If you listen to vendors, analysts and just about anyone else in IT apart from actual enterprise IT executives, you might think that cloud-based services have taken root as an inescapable technology choice these days. However, as Coffey--who is a vice president with Allstate Insurance--put it, CIOs are wary of jumping in too deep before the technology is proven and the concerns about privacy, security and complexity are worked out.  

Like many of her colleagues at the conference, Coffey said she is taking a wait-and-see approach to cloud computing, trying to stay on top of developments without making risky investments. "We are a company that relies a lot on data, and it is very important for us to keep that secure," she said. "We are kind of watching and learning. In general, we will not be in the front of things, especially things like that."

Other top items on the SIMposium agenda last week included outsourcing, social media and the pressure to support consumer technologies. ("We joke about that in IT," Coffey said. "The biggest issue is the SkyMall magazine--all of our CEOs sit there on the plane and then they want this gadget or that gadget.")

As for outsourcing, the big question seems to be how to identify the right reasons for doing it. Despite ongoing budget pressures on CIOs, there is a recognition that outsourcing solely for the purpose of saving money in the short run isn't a good idea, Coffey said.

"I think we all know you shouldn't do it just for cost," Coffey said, adding that CIOs are beginning to think that outsourcing could lead to some unintended and unwelcome consequences. "I don't know that any of us have done a great job thinking out 10 to 20 years about what will this mean."

The first area that may cause difficulties for companies that outsource a lot of important IT functions may be in the realm of succession planning, Coffey said.  If crucial tasks are being handled externally, how does your own workforce gain the experience necessary to develop a mindset for IT leadership?  "How do your employees get to be strategic or visionary except by working their way to it?" she asked.

Exacerbating CIOs' concerns about the impact of outsourcing on cultivating future IT leaders is a growing worry that outsourcing is discouraging young people in this country from pursuing careers in IT. The number of college students studying IT has dropped, in part because of a perception that jobs are all moving offshore.

"Now we've pushed a bunch of work away and we have a bunch of old CIOs who aren't going to be around forever," she said. "I don't know if there's going to be some crisis or not, but I do think we haven't thought it through really well."

Few of the discussion items at this year's SIMposium raised brand new issues, but long-time concerns are taking on new meanings. There's little doubt that outsourcing--along with cloud computing, social media and the consumerization of IT--will crop up again on the SIMposium 2011 agenda. - Caron