It’s all great fun, really, kicking around ‘The Future Role of the CIO’. It keeps the conversation rattling at conferences and fills the pages and screens of the ICT and even the business media. We do our modest bit. It is certainly more interesting in general than The Future Role of the CFO. Even CEOs are by and large more interesting in terms of their personalities and image rather than their capabilities and inextricably linked to the market success of their brands. Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuckerberg et al. are all very interesting, were in Jobs’ case, but did we ever really wonder about their roles? This is perhaps, because it is, and was, often a bit hard to extract the CEO from the geek legend or the marketing showbiz (that’s Larry). If we wanted to seriously consider the role of the CEO in our beloved ICT sector, perhaps Rometty, Whitman, Mayer or Burns* might be better models to study. But then they don’t really do any of that showbiz schtick, do they? Lovable/likeable/interesting eccentricity is not part of their CEO personae. On the other hand, a more serious examination of The Role of the CIO might well include them-and be much more interesting than the gender discussion.
This time around we should perhaps extend the chat to embrace the CTO, not least because he, or much less frequently she, has a key role in non-ICT industries like pharma, aerospace, medtech, nanotech and of course electronics. It is a role that varies from sector to enterprise and to specific markets and even niches, just like the CIO. You can find one in an ambitious company of 50 or 100 employees almost as readily as in a Fortune 500 corporation, again just like a CIO. Ambitious or at least forward-looking is one of the key cultural aspects in the organisation. There is really little point in having a either a CIO or a CTO if either is in reality just a fancy modern title for the IT manager and the engineering supervisor.
Leaving aside the perennial consideration of keeping the lights on, what the CIO and CTO roles have in common above all else is applied futurology, short and medium term. The job involves making informed calls from time to time on the best or most appropriate technology choices for their organisation’s future. A significant part of that, in turn, is perception-spotting the opportunities and indeed the threats for the organisation that may lie along the development lines of current and new technologies.
Today’s tech hype is mostly around cloud computing as the answer to everything and the future of the world, mobile ICT and the never-ending parade of funky device fashions. At a slightly more advanced level, Big Data and BYOD are probably the next most frequently discussed. Slightly outside of our business focus here in ComputerScope, there is little doubt that the biggest paradigm shift is in entertainment and news, the convergence of television, film and video, games and gaming and anything else that can be delivered on a screen-or hologram. Behind, beyond or underneath all of that is the consistent Moore’s Law development of computing itself. Advances in movie technology, notably CGI and digital rendering, have contributed to our ability to handle and in fact analyse Big Data in real time or close to it. Today’s high performance computing is tomorrow’s personal device or, more likely, something like Dobby the House Elf a.k.a. the home server. Both are supported by super-fast graphics cards.
So where are we headed and what should our attentive CIOs and CTOs anticipate? Well, for openers, In Our Humble Opinion (IOHU) cloud computing will have disappeared into itself, condensed into a range of pools of power that we may very well learn to refer to simply as ‘computing’ or ‘the system’ or something like that. We might even get over our fears and call this next generation of combined computing and communications ‘the Internet’ or ‘the Web’ but with a deeper appreciation of its depth and potential. As for BYOD or this column’s current favourite phrase ‘screen of choice’ to bypass the individual device market hype, what will disappear is the daft notion that your current employer should dictate what personal tools you should use for work or anything else.
In any event we suspect that personal devices will be chosen and ranked by screen, the only physical constraint, so that by about mid-decade we should be talking about ‘smart screens’ for particular tasks. Colour screens, in every size from an inch or two to a full life size apartment wall for home entertainment, are also likely to remain the most expensive component to manufacture. The completion for ever-higher quality, coupled with 3D, will drive the high end while commodity screens are still likely to be relatively more costly than the chips, transceivers or casings.
So attention, retail CIOs, tomorrow’s world of shelf edge pricing will be delivered centrally to hundreds of live display screens-probably with proximity or touch functionality to offer more product information to the consumer. CTO: why shouldn’t every electric plug or socket display the consumption level? As well as being remotely controllable from the home server (or Dobby), of course. In fact with Dobby’s assistance people will be able to control domestic devices remotely anyway, just as Dobby and his army of sensors will be able to alert you to anything you should know about, from a sudden external temperature drop to an appliance fault to an intruder. You will only need your smart screen, of course, since the advanced voice recognition will take care of access and security.
Back up to the conceptual level, the complete convergence of computing and communications seems clearly where we are headed, taking John Gage’s famous and prophetic slogan for Sun MicroSystems "the network is the computer" to global level. The interface will simply be a smart screen and all users, much less all employees, will have a range of favourites for different tasks and situations. That science fiction classic the communicator watch will certainly be a reality and the pocket version will be ruggedised or bendable for jeans. That life size screen could be used for tomorrow’s spreadsheet equivalent-especially if you want the graphic 3D data cube version-but many people will remain traditional enough to like a personal desktop display and even an actual desk.
Meetings will of course be in 3D reality video, although the Friday night pints in the pub session will hardly go away, certainly not in Irish business culture. On the other hand, if daily business is casually collaborative but virtual, we might start to see ‘Dress Up’ Fridays. A little bit further into the future we may well project our avatars into both business meetings and social gatherings.
A perceptive phrase came up online recently, ‘the gamification of work’. It does suggest what a lot of us old-timers in ICT cannot object to in any way, because we are by nature in favour of technological progress. But we are afraid of the notion in other ways because as traditionally educated adults we fear the infantilisation of learning, the trivialisation of news and serious political issues and the conquest of the (Western) world by American English.
But we can hope that The System that delivers gamification of content delivery can also offer the world’s great libraries and general heritage of civilisation, digitised for my smart screen. Digital preservation of architecture and monuments and archaeological sites is already standard academic practice and the definitive way to maintain and understand the layers of history. Our personally beloved Liddell & Scott ‘Greek-English Lexicon’ is free online. The threat to our culture and traditions, in business as at home or in education, is really in ourselves not the media or the channels.
A reasonable view is that all of this will concern the CIO and her (maybe his) CTO colleague because all service business-and much of retail, logistics and the design and on-demand functions of manufacturing-will move completely into this new, universally connected world. ‘Ubiquitous computing’ is the current term, easily converged with ‘pervasive networks’ and ‘mesh’ is a useful and more easily pronounced and popularised term that might win out. Now that 4G mobile services have outpaced even the speeded-up version of ADSL/DSL, the vision is both realistic and actually inevitable. Seamless handover between networks is already standard, least-cost routing will shortly follow and of course single-vendor, all-channel all-you-can-eat IP traffic is tomorrow’s comms market.
The logic is that service providers will rule the world and that is where the competition will be. From a CIO and in fact general business leadership point of view, the focus will shift back to applications and content, where it always should have been, rather than the technology. The future for the CIO and in-house ICT will be in what we are learning to call data science, the management and analysis of all of that data/content for the various purposes and activities of colleagues, i.e. their applications. Everything else will be channel or hardware, networking and computing fused into a federated global system.
Where will you make a career-or just profit?
*Tsk, tsk: IBM, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo, Xerox respectively.
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