"A Paradox that gets CIOs"

"It’ll be a neat trick if you can drive innovation and growth while tightly managing costs, compliance and risk." writes Abbie Lundberg at CIO Magazine. She then cites Gene Hall of Gartner as saying "that the number of CIOs getting fired is on the rise because "many CEOs believe that their CIO is [too] cost-focused and not capable of contributing to growth—and they need IT to contribute to growth."

What Kool-Aid are these industry luminaries drinking? Saving money from utility IT spend is far from over. In 3 transactions in the last few months I have in each case delivered to clients over 30% savings compared to incumbent spend (in one case 65%). Abbie and Gene are providing CIOs (and CEOs) bad advice if they tell them to stop crunching that spend (including their spend on Gartner)

On the other hand with the huge amount of innovation going on - from web 2.0 to mobility to telemetry to SaaS and much more - if CIOs cannot leverage at least some of that innovation, they do deserve to move on.

Tastes Great. Less Filling.  It's not either or.