The pressure on the CIO to help build, sustain, improve and expand the business seems to growing. A scan of last week's tech press shows the beginning flow of year-end reviews and forecasts, looking back on the how the role of CIO evolved in 2010 and how it is expected to change going forward. A quick look at these pieces suggests that the CIO needs to be a strategist, customer-centric business leader, profit prophet, big picture specialist, changeling and visionary, among other things.

The general reason behind the ballooning job description is that business is moving fast, and the CIO--and IT--is supposed to stay one step ahead of it. But at what point does the rapid pace of change become too fast? Too fast for employees to handle, too fast for customers to absorb, too fast for laws and regulations to account for, and too fast for society to adjust to?

Andrew McAfee takes an interesting look at the problem with ever-enabling technologies in a post at HarvardBusinessReview. He argues that technology that offers too much choice can become confusing and even paralyzing. There is evidence to suggest that people, despite always asking for more, actually appreciate some limits on their autonomy and some restrictions on their actions. In other words, more bells and whistles do not always produce greater satisfaction. It would seem then that an important part of the CIO's job would be to control the pace of technology change, reining it in at times. 

Last month at the annual gathering of the Society for Information Management in Atlanta, I talked to a number of CIOs about the challenges associated with the dizzying pace of technology change. Some were quite candid in acknowledging that more is not always better, but no one wanted to be quoted saying so. Some vendors, I'm told, recognize the problem of pushing technology faster than users can handle it (one case was described where regression testing took longer than the release cycle, leaving everyone always lagging behind), and they have slowed the introduction of new versions of software.

As the CIO's job description continues to expand and responsibilities mount, how big should the role of brakeman be? Is the topic too unpopular or too unfashionable to address head on? How do CEOs, COOs and CFOs react when told that their organization's technology maybe shouldn't move so quickly? This isn't something written about very often, so I would love to hear your views. - Caron