The CIO's Choice

Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO, writes in a recent blog post:

I miss Peter Drucker. He was both visionary and pragmatist: a Wise Man for the dawn of the information age. Brilliant, with  an amazing historic perspective, he was nevertheless approachable and down to earth. Business and business leaders owe him a debt of gratitude. His death at 95 two years ago was a huge loss.

I had the priviledge of meeting Drucker a few times at CIO conferences, and we ran a number of articles about and with him, the last being a conversation between Drucker and Tom Davenport about 10 years ago.

The reason I’m thinking of him today is that a) I recently received another collection of his writings, which I’m looking forward to reading, and b) a few nights ago I attended a dinner of the Boston SIM chapter where one of his predictions from at least 15 years ago was presented as having finally arrived.

The talk was given by Alex Cullen, vice president and research director at Forrester. What Drucker said back in the early ‘90s was that there would be a bifurcation in the CIO role. What Forrester is saying today (to paraphrase Yogi Berra), is “There’s a fork in the road. Take it.” I.e., bifurcation. Split.

Good piece. There is indeed a bifurcation awaiting. I don't think this poses a dilemma for the CIO. She must take the path of innovation and strategy. I believe the CTO must take up the second path and handle the day to day operational aspects of IT. The challenge is to revise the job specs and career paths for CIOs and CTOs so that they arrive in position with the right DNA profile.

I get into this in my new book The IT Value Stack. One of the book's contributors, Sam Lowe from Cap Gemini presents an interesting perspective on this in the book.