The transformation of the role of CIO is an ongoing story, and the 2010 chapter has seen its share of action. As the year begins to draw to a close, experts and observers are reviewing the changes that have taken place and forecasting the demands that lie ahead. Three such reviews/forecasts have just been posted at InformationWeek, CIOUpdate and CIOInsight.

Although the CIO's transformation "from high-tech high priests to customer-centric business leader" isn't new, it was accelerated considerably over the past year, writes InformationWeek's Bob Evans. The lagging economy and the pressure on businesses to move rapidly further drove CIOs to focus on business imperatives and customer demands. What's more, other major IT trends over the year--such as cloud computing and enterprise mobility--forced CIOs to take an increasingly strategic view of technology's place in the enterprise, in Evans' view.

Evans is emphatic, however, that the transformed CIO role is not "to align IT with the business," which he sees as symbolizing "the old status of the CIO as an industrious and committed quasi-executive more focused on servers and uptime than on customer engagement and revenue growth."

If your job is to align IT with the business, Evans argues, then you tacitly agree that the IT organization isn't an integral part of the business, and that does not leave you in a good place. The new role is to get rid of the gap between IT and the business.

"The new and transformed CIO is a business leader prized for applying technical expertise to tying together strategy and execution, to leveraging his/her unique knowledge of the organization's end-to-end business processes, to weaving social technology aggressively into the company's operations and culture, and who's leading the charge to show how IT can generate new and more-profitable forms of customer engagements and partner and supplier dynamics," Evans writes.

For another perspective on the evolving CIO role, take a look at an article by Pam Baker at CIOUpdate. The CIO's responsibilities are expanding beyond IT into areas such as energy conservation and sustainability, Baker reports, and the the successful CIO of tomorrow will have to be a "profit prophet," "big picture specialist" and "changeling."

Finally, CIOInsight's Dennis McAfferty summarizes in a slideshow the leadership qualities that future CIOs will have to demonstrate. Based on a report on executive leadership from MWW Group, McAfferty reports that vision and the ability to anticipate developments will become more important that salesman-like skills or a talent for boosterism.

For more:
- see Bob Evans' column at InformationWeek
- see Pam Baker's article at CIOUpdate
- see Dennis McAfferty's slideshow at CIOInsight

Related Articles:
Advice for the new CIO
Using autonomy, mastery and purpose to motivate
"Buy-In" and other books for the CIO reading list
Change management: The only constant?
Leadership principles for good karma