Sadly I missed this Enterprise 2.0 conference but wanted to share some thoughts with you. Here is a good quick summary from Information week. This was a gathering of many CIO and IT leaders. Clearly top on everybody’s mind is how rapidly and broadly IT is evolving. Gone are the days that the CIO was the gate keeper about what a company could buy (hardware/software/services/products/resource allocation) and how IT should operate. One the biggest changes in corporate IT has been the massive DEMOCRATIZATION of IT. I spoke about this on an earlier blog and wanted to revisit this topic in light of the recent conference.

With the advent of anything-as-a-service, the dependency of groups within a corporation to the IT group has and continues to greatly diminish. Today, I don’t have to submit a requisition, wait weeks or months, have debates in budget meetings and loose sleepless nights to have access to hardware, software and applications. In fact, I can provision the application and never worry about owning anything. This is key in prototyping (will tell you why in a minute) but also changing the mindset of groups on IT. Yes, when the corporation then wants to bring in a ‘service’ as a standard and costs come into play, yes, then the CIO might get involved, but not as much.

Take the case of Salesforce.com, prior to which, sales management software selection, evaluation, customization and provisioning was a nightmare and cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Today, log onto a site, try it out, for free, see what you think? Get what you want, when you want and gone are the days of week long training classes to teach people the du jour product. I am sure you agree that this evolution is not only well under way but the new normal in many companies.

Hence, it is only rational the role of the CIO is changing in today’s new normal, specially that groups can utilize their own budget to provision applications and don’t have to be held hostage to the IT budget grind. So, this is changing the role of the CIO. Yes, we still need to be mindful about what we spend money on and make sure things run flawlessly, BUT, this is not longer the powerful position it used to be. By no means.

The democratization of IT, is impacting all aspects of the company like a storm and the successful companies are those who recognize and embrace this. Now, on the point of prototyping, this warrants special mention. One of the biggest benefits of the democratization and decentralization of IT and the ability to provision what you need, when you need, is the ability to be very agile in prototyping. Rapid prototyping allows us to experiment on what-if ideas quickly and efficiently, allowing a company to explore many avenues of innovation.

So, why am I excited? Because given the massive technical talent in companies we need to pave the road and be far more innovative than we are today. Road blocks such as ‘this has to be approved by the CIO’s office ‘ OR, ‘there is no way I can build a prototype efficiently’ are huge obstacles that we have to remove. Let’s empower groups to be innovative and productive.

The real question is: What should the role of a CIO be in this new democratic IT landscape? Should there even be a CIO? What do you think?