For the CIO, a few years ago his job was to buy hardware and software and network and services and put it all together over 12 or 24 months. At the end it goes well or doesn’t or goes somewhat well. But now with all the new technology breakthroughs in cloud and social and mobile and the rest, there are completely new sourcing models. You rightly said that the CIO’s role is moving from nuts and bolts to someone who offers business services, the custodian who enables the organization to run. His world is changing and he has choices primarily powered by the new technologies and the new engagement paradigm. Just like the sourcing and procurement guy’s job is to negotiate the best contracts and get the maximum amount of spend under management, just like HR needs to do a great job of managing talent, the CIO has to manage and provide all the business services on demand, and the rest of the guys are consumers. It can and ought to be a very symbiotic relationship once it is settled and the roles and structure and governance are in place. Some already understand this, and now marketing is going to take some time to catch up with the maturity you see in HR.
Is this mix of business services moving off premise or to the hands of external providers?
Some of our clients have approached this more as a turnkey platform but many want to start small and on premise. It is early days but I think eventually the power will come from a turnkey service. It is not uncommon for organizations to throw a lot of money at marketing technology. The moment you start splitting the functions, everybody has a plan but often it is not working. Everybody sees a point solution but the power comes when you fuse it all together. [What we offer] is to take social, mobility, big data, video, cloud, fuses it all to cloud, which is nothing but a pipe really where you offload complexity Some already understand this, but it is happening slowly and it will take some time for marketing to catch up with the maturity you see in HR.
Jim Ericson is editorial director of Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jimericson.
