Interesting dichotomy, and one that shows up readily at my level. The doers want to innovate but are constantly stifled by upper leadership, who want to cut costs and reduce change. So, who needs a CIO?
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...
The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying "No", not "What if..." And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered "We don't stock it anymore. It kept selling out."
And this great quote about the CIOs of Universities:
The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with "disk storage allocations" and "acceptable use policies". The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.
No kiddin'! The software is getting smart enough and is typically free -- just get out of our way!
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/who_needs_a_cio.html
