Taken from Jack van Hoof's blog
New waves of technological innovation lead to new businesses for IT-delivery. These new businesses use very fast and ultra large scale models to deliver IT-services to consumers. These businesses deliver infrastructure like processing, storage and network capacities within minutes at rates of a few cents per hour usage. Consumers can access virtual PC-s in virtual LAN-s at any size for any period of time on demand using protocols like RDP (Remote Desk Top), which gives the user a local experience of high capacity. On top of this infrastructure other businesses deliver application functionality at the same ultra large scale. Amortizations are spread over huge amounts of users world wide connected over the Internet. In every enterprise time-to-market as well as IT-costs are continuously under pressure. As emerging new businesses promise - and currently start to prove - to dramatically cut down time-to-market and costs, the enterprises' IT-departments must prepare for change. Although the change will be fundamental, it is not realistic to rely on a big bang. To deliver application functionality and platform services to the enterprise, policies need to be established with regard to: A. In-house delivery B. Outsouring to partners C. Consuming services from the cloud During the next 5 years a hybrid situation will evolve with changing weight from A to B to C. Many organizations already witness the change from A to B, starting with consuming housing services and evolving to consuming hosting services. To guarantee flexibility and interoperability in a hybrid context - which will last for a long time, if not forever - extensive platform standardization is required. Three subjects will dominate the CIO's agenda for the next couple of years: - Platform standardization - Sourcing strategy - Commodity utilization 1. Platform standardization Application platforms (a framework essentially consisting of Portals, an ESB-s, DBMS-s, Application servers, Web browsers) and infrastructure platforms (essentially offering OS, Network, Storage and underlying hardware) need to be highly standardized in order to allow easy interoperability and scalability and flexible deployments. These platforms need to be based on open architectures to allow for seamless integration internally and externally. 2. Sourcing strategy Delivery will be outsourced to specialized parties, whose core business is IT-delivery. The enterprise can take advantage of the competences and efficiency of scale of specialized suppliers. Focus will change from own in-house delivery to orchestration of delivery by multiple sourcing partners. 3. Commodity utilization Platform services and application functionality from the cloud is emerging. PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) will become available instantly on demand and on a pay-as-you-go basis with automated fast-scale facilities. Global scaling benefits of tens of thousands of highly standardized virtualized resources lead to huge cost reductions with hardly any pre-investment. After a level of trust has been established with regard to performance, availability and security, enterprises will massively embrace these offerings. Small organizations and start-ups with little or no budget and hardly any legacy will be the first ones and are already consuming these services today.

Who cares?

Who cares?

Hahahahahahahaha!!!!

My pick would be that the top 3 priorities would be 1. Who to promote 2. Who to fire 3. Who to talk to and who to ignore! I really think CIO are more about the IT organization than IT technical stuff!

My pick would be that the top 3 priorities would be

1. Who to promote
2. Who to fire
3. Who to talk to and who to ignore!

I really think CIO are more about the IT organization than IT technical stuff!

Firstly: Sourcing (including PaaS and SaaS) versus do-it-your-self is nothing else but IT organization. People will be fired and people will be promoted. Third parties will be talked to and others will be ignored. Secondly: IT technical stuff is something different from technological innovation waves allowing enormous cost reductions. IT (re)organization is the main effect of these new technological opportunities. CIO's with no technological perspective are not able to organize IT properly, and will fail. -Jack (IT-architect of the CIO-office of Dutch Railways)