CIO Not a Canary Anymore Date:   Sunday , March 04, 2012 “I own the technology, you own the content”. This is the statement most CIOs have been making, when they meet their marketing teams. But now, we are not going to hear this statement anymore, thanks to the growing trend of marketing team acquiring IT capabilities in most enterprises. In the recent years the marketing methods in enterprises have undergone a profound change due to the shift to the digital means. The rapidly changing consumer technology world, along with a huge helping hand from the Web, is fundamentally changing how business gets done. For instance, the cloud is rapidly becoming the way we deliver and receive virtually every meaningful service today, from music, TV, applications, news, phone calls, social media and many more. Moreover CIOs of large enterprises have started moving their IT and datacenters outside their organizations. A combination of forces -- the move to mobility, the arrival of a new generation of employees and the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend -- is changing the world of IT with a speed that might have seemed impossible a few years ago. In the coming years, with more and more different business functions within the enterprises, companies would need a great deal of new social, mobile, cloud-based, and customer-centric business solutions. And most of them have realized that the only way to get it is to have a mature management capability of their own that understands long term technology, portfolio, project, and vendor management. This transformation is going to dilute the responsibilities of CIOs. A CIO trying to grab control of everything will never work and his role is not going to be a role of canary in the organizations today anymore. They need to understand the customer. Innovation in the business must be built on a solid partnership between the CIO and CMO, with shared goals and metrics, a common business language, and deep collaboration. If we are successful in practicing it in our enterprises, conquering the world of consumerization is going to be easy. Please do share your thoughts with us. Christo Jacob Managing Editor editor@siliconindia.com