CIO Priorities: The Oracle POV

Bob Evans, Chief Communications Officer at Oracle has a nice “State of the CIO Nation” post at Forbes, with the infograph below and he cites examples from GE, Monsanto and other companies. ‘

It’s a feel-good post from a CIO perspective but I had a few observations on some of his points.

1) Generate New Revenue Streams – new revenue is likely to come from smarter products and services which embed or are enabled by sensors, software, satellites and other technology. In many companies, the lead role there is being taken by the product engineering or R&D groups. There are several companies where the engineering groups today have more software engineers reporting to them than to the CIO. And they have design, contract manufacturing and other expertise which few CIOs are likely to be able to match. So, IT is likely to have a secondary role in this area

4) Evangelize Cloud Computing – more than the CIO, many technology vendors need to heed this advice. They have little incentive to move away from older data centers, on-premise software maintenance revenues, traditional application management and BPO contracts.

5) Evangelize Digital Business – I think a business savvy CIO is ideally suited to do this, but in many companies, the CMO is (rightly or wrongly) perceived as the Chief Digital Officer. 

10) Accelerate Cybersecurity – I would have this much higher on the list. Also, I would like to see Oracle lead an industry coalition to tackle the many facets of cybersecurity – certainly with its expertise with government, telecom and other sectors, it is well positioned to do so.

Overall, tough to argue with Bob’s point that the demise of the CIO has been greatly exaggerated.