Will the Emerging Earth Have CIOs?

Chris Anderson questions the relevance of the CIO in the face of emerging information technologies:

CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

That puts many CIOs in the position of not being the technology innovator in their company, but rather the dead weight keeping the real technology innovators–employees who want to use the tools increasingly available on the wide-open Web to help them do their jobs better–from taking matters into their own hands.

I once left an employer because my CIO was holding me back. Perhaps CIOs can adapt and stay relevant by transforming their roles: from technology gatekeepers to technology evangelists, from restricting employees’ use of emerging technologies to guiding it. That would shift their functions from internal policing to internal sales — a shift from dictation to persuasion, a shift not many people have the credibility to make.